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> News makes you scared of highly dramatic and highly unlikely events (plane crashes, shark attacks, terrorism etc) while also being oblivious to insidious and
by time_to_smile 5y ago
> News makes you scared of highly dramatic and highly unlikely events (plane crashes, shark attacks, terrorism etc) while also being oblivious to insidious and creeping risks that are low-key and hard to make dramatic and visual (say antibiotic resistance or indeed chronic stress caused by being in a news-induced perpetual state of physiological arousal).
This is perhaps one of the most important points in this post that's buried pretty deep in the article.
The author here is not advocating for "head-in-the-sand" avoidance of reality.
Often when I see real, systemic issues brought up on HN or elsewhere: climate, the overshoot of industrial society, resource depletion etc. These concerns are often dismissed as "the media just wants you anxious!". But, by and large, the real scary pieces of information about these topics are not published by major media.
The media wants you anxious, but not so concerned that you seriously question our mainstream mode of life. You should worry about nuclear war with Russia, but not about the war for natural gas that's really going on. You should be anxious about climate change, but only enough to make you recycle, not so much that you question the economic system that is fundamentally unstable.
- beaconstudios 5y agoThe media is owned by powerful corporations and individuals, but at the same time it's profitable to keep people in heightened emotional states. So on one hand they want to induce fear and anxiety, but at the same time they don't want to give anyone real concerns about the world we live in that might cause them to want to disempower the media's owners.