Looking at the media of the past weeks/years, I’ve noticed these things:
- Local problems are WAY more important than remote problems. The 5 (or more?) kills (because of terrorism) a day in Afghanistan aren’t important to the media. One kill during a dance festival, however, is horrible, and requires all the attention of the public. And I didn’t even count for all the other deaths in the world.
- The media never cares about the indirect and a bit more complex news. For example, where the 9/11 (World Trade Center) killed “only” 3.017 people, 229.866 people were killed by the Indian Earthquake in 2004 which caused a tsunami. I cannot deny that 3.017 is a lot, but the media was way more interested in the terrorist attack of 9/11. Why? My guess is that it was because either people think it’s too far away (after all, India isn’t exactly a part of the Occident world), but it could also be because a terrorist attack is more spectacular and the media would receive more views.
- Saying anything about this is “not done”. For example, a Brazilian advertising company published a non-official WWF poster a few days ago. Sure, the WWF denied it was in any way related to them but if you ask me I’d say they are damn right. If we can’t talk about the kills made by terrorists, and people don’t care about the kills made by nature, how are we ever going to return nature to the state it once had? Or should we just destroy it and let our sons and daughters fix the problems we created?
In other words: Our media is too much focused on entertaining the public, instead of bringing true facts.
Tom