Bad News For People Who Love Good News
(This was a comment written in response to the typical observation that there is so much bad news in media, and that the cause must be a perverse pleasure on the part of those media's audiences.)
I don't know what it is with bad news, but I'm not sure it's just perverse pleasure. More that people are so frightened of their safety that they NEED to know EVERY bad thing that happens in order to keep themselves scared and therefore alert. Or, you could do it the other way and say that since every media outlet of consequence in the entire country is owned by one of five megacorporations, they feed fear into the news media specifically in order to scare people into being good corporate citizens. After all, they have to buy all their deadbolts and security systems and guns and gas masks and duct tape and bottled water from somebody.
And the craziest thing is, it's not just that there's a greater proportion of bad news than there used to be, there's a greater proportion of bad news shown AND actual crime and other bad things have gone down! It's a double increase of the bad news:actual events ratio. Bizarre.
If you want a rational, unbiased, informed and eloquent voice in the news, check out Christopher Hitchens (thanks rinku for mentioning him all those months ago). He often finds himself on the Bush side of many political arguments, but certainly it is not from some neoconservative party-line bias. After all, he used to be one of the shining stars of The New Republic, was a staunch anti-Vietnam protestor, lambasted Reagan in his obituary, and is a practicing atheist and secularist. In other words, he is a liberal when the liberals are right (mostly, in the 70's) and a conservative when the conservatives are right (occasionally, presently, but certainly more often than the liberals at this point).
P.S. That link goes directly to Hitchens' scathing rebuttal of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's carnival of deceit. It is probably his best-written article, at least on Slate. You can find his other articles from there.
I don't know what it is with bad news, but I'm not sure it's just perverse pleasure. More that people are so frightened of their safety that they NEED to know EVERY bad thing that happens in order to keep themselves scared and therefore alert. Or, you could do it the other way and say that since every media outlet of consequence in the entire country is owned by one of five megacorporations, they feed fear into the news media specifically in order to scare people into being good corporate citizens. After all, they have to buy all their deadbolts and security systems and guns and gas masks and duct tape and bottled water from somebody.
And the craziest thing is, it's not just that there's a greater proportion of bad news than there used to be, there's a greater proportion of bad news shown AND actual crime and other bad things have gone down! It's a double increase of the bad news:actual events ratio. Bizarre.
If you want a rational, unbiased, informed and eloquent voice in the news, check out Christopher Hitchens (thanks rinku for mentioning him all those months ago). He often finds himself on the Bush side of many political arguments, but certainly it is not from some neoconservative party-line bias. After all, he used to be one of the shining stars of The New Republic, was a staunch anti-Vietnam protestor, lambasted Reagan in his obituary, and is a practicing atheist and secularist. In other words, he is a liberal when the liberals are right (mostly, in the 70's) and a conservative when the conservatives are right (occasionally, presently, but certainly more often than the liberals at this point).
P.S. That link goes directly to Hitchens' scathing rebuttal of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's carnival of deceit. It is probably his best-written article, at least on Slate. You can find his other articles from there.