Sunday 19 July 2020

Don't Panic, It's Not Quite The News. [a random post]


Don't Panic, It's Not Quite The News.
Minor outbreaks of new viruses have been common in recent years. Almost all have been off the mainstream news, almost utterly unworthy of note. Recent new viruses in places like China, or new outbreaks of old viruses, seem to be nothing of a vast amount of note. The Coronavirus issue is the only important outbreak at this time. The news are covering minor numbers of 17 new COVID cases, a small number of plague cases, a pig virus, etc. In China. Largely, this isn't very newsworthy. Just as a few other minor virus news stories in America have been filler and fear that sells. Note that the areas involved are often vast and the human cost is minor and because viruses are viral(trending) news every news website tries to capitalise on a new angle or the latest scoop.
The Coronavirus is obviously the news worth subject. That said, young Jewish baby boys injured from traditional circumcision method related infections, herpes causing brain injury for example, in cities like New York, is a continuous cost in human suffering. Yet, that isn't a COVID related subject matter. Honour killing in Pakistan kill thousands of young women and girls every year, but that isn't worth stating right now?? Equally, concentration camps in China aren't as important as a few more coronavirus cases in the same nation?? Methinks that many of our great news providers are busy being whores for attention, which at least makes the BBC cover a story just because everyone else has published an article on the subject. Such as Trump-related news, it is often a matter of a slight blunder, a dumb point or question, then the reaction causes the news to linger and even flourish. Thus, the news story derived from the old causes the need for the mainstream to march over old ground.
News is news-worthy because news sources have stated a thing as the news, the New Story. A great amount of the olds seems to be sold as news, or a new angle on an old story. Meanwhile, we see next to nothing on many other stories. And those stories rarely trend on twitter or are seen on the news search headlines on google or bing. I do sometimes feel that the art of news reporting is past its prime and the common news method is steeped in mediocracy and repetition between news services. Leaving often very little room for intellectualism, as something very close to copy-and-paste in lieu of journalist ability. Yet, at least regarding the present crisis of Corona, we can understand com0pletely why we might see a great amount of repetition.

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