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Media may like it for ratings. Sick, I know.

• matt4077 9y ago
  I like how you're disgusted at actual people for a hypothetical that you came up with not empirically, but because it appears to make sense to you. But to ease your pain: "media" isn't a person, and therefore doesn't like or dislike or fancy or abhor anything. As to journalists: From nytimes.com getting 10% more visitors on some day because of some terror attack to anyone's actual pay check or job security takes so many steps it's basically meaningless as a conditioning signal.
  • barrkel 9y ago
    And companies are just people. Yes, indeed. "If it bleeds, it leads" - the people who choose headlines or what gets airtime select for urgency and impact within what they perceive to be their demographic. They amp up things that they know hook into trigger-points in their audience, because that's what gets the audience emotionally engaged, because engagement means revenue. Terror attacks can be played in a number of different ways, depending on the audience and what they're afraid of; whether it's immigrants, other religions, or social freedoms and militarization of the public sphere, there's plenty of fear all around to write about and get the audience riled up on. And if you don't think there's a profit motive in a media source engaging with its audience, there's not much hope for you.
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Media isn't a person. It's a machine. A series of feedback loops within our economy that occupy a market niche in which optimizing for maximum fear and outrage is optimizing for profit. As you say, there are so many steps between getting visitors and someone's paycheck that you can't really blame a particular person within the system. That doesn't change the overall system behaviour, though. Everyone there, in aggregate, optimize for maximum fear and outrage.