Interesting Links for 18-11-2015

[andrewducker]

• Record Number Of Terrorism Experts Report For Duty In Internet Comment Sections
  • terrorism satire funny web comments
• The gene that explains why some people cannot hold their drink
  • serotonin alcohol genetics
• Ten Things You'll Only Get if You Were a 2050's Kid
  • scifi short_story
• The media did cover attacks on *insert country here*. You just weren’t

Comments

[ext_2864067]

Regarding 'The media did cover attacks...'

The article's writer is taking an opposite and equally absurd position to the one that she criticises.

Western media do give less coverage to disasters and deaths further away. Yes, they're reported, but they're not displayed anything like as prominently.

This is primarily because their audience are less interested by things happening far away. But even so, placing all the responsibility on the reader and none on the media source is as wrong-headed as the other way round.

[andrewducker]

It seems to me that if someone wants to be well educated about the world then they need to go to media sources and read them in depth. Reading jus the front few pages or, even worse, those articles that their friends choose to repost on FB/Twitter/LJ means that they are choosing to only get the most popular articles in their in-group. And I do hold people responsible for that (once they realise that newspapers _don't_ order their articles randomly, but by the amount of perceived interest/category).

[ext_2864067]

The responsibility is shared.

It is very easy to read up on things at a surface level, and most people don't have the time - and aren't encouraged to make the time - to research much deeper than that.

Media sources aren't some sort of passive mechanism that simply produces what people will click on or read. They're run by people, and those people are well aware of the effect of prioritising one news story over another.

To say that it's the consumers' responsibility to read critically, not that of the media sources as well, is the Daily Mail excuse. 'We're not being irresponsible, we're just giving people what they want'.

[andrewducker]

I don't see it as shared, because media _has_ to categorise and order things. Unless you are literally saying that they should shuffle their articles so that people get randomly exposed to stuff, I don't know what you want them to do.

[ext_2864067]

What I'd like them to do is not to randomly shuffle the articles but to prioritise them with less weight given to locality, both in the ordering of stories and in how they're reported.

[andrewducker]

I'd be up for a little less weight being given to locality. But I also think that caring more about people nearby (both culturally and physically) is something that people do. And that most people don't appreciate being told "This is the news you're supposed to care about". It's not an easy balance to find between "Here is the news we'd like you to know about" and "Oh, the vast majority of our readers have left to go to www.ExcitingNearbyNews.com"

[drdoug]

It's never been easier to find news not so strongly weighted by your locality. Most respectable news outlets have a 'World' or 'International' section - usually a single click from the home page - which goes a long way in that direction. And it's very easy to read news from places a long way from where you are, to give you a different perspective, or to give you a local perspective on an issue you're far away from. It's also not that hard to find more information to explain the background to a complex ongoing issue

[ggreig]

RTFWorldSection will work for people who're enthusiastic enough to go looking for it. For everyone else, it's a great way to tidy stuff away so it never even crosses their consciousness. Which isn't to say I don't think it should exist for coverage in greater depth - it absolutely should, in the same way that there is a point to the manuals or help files that most people never read - but a bit more international news mixed into the general section would probably be no bad thing.