This story also responds to a recent J.Wildfire story on personal types of outrage.
People run facts through eyes, ears, and minds. Their world-views prepositioning expressive personal outcomes. So be it.
We should be aware that the existing modern media industry profits from this process, and can capitalize on people’s world views, by design.
This method isn’t simply ‘if it bleeds it leads’ though that underpins much-published news, more it’s the marginalizing of available story facts to obtain a narration that optimizes reader and viewer attention.
So a typical trope of modern media is ‘here are both sides to this story’. In other words, cherry-picking the story narrative to drive the biggest audience. There could be many more important story narrations missing based on facts tossed aside in the interest of immediate audience building. It’s like the difference between a headline and reading a book. The readers and viewers are left with the scantest of narratives to ponder.
A good thought experiment would be how 2 stories evolved. Comparing the Afghanistan & Myanmar stories, both stories reporting years evolving some nation-state regime change, 38 vs. 54 million people respectively as per 2019. Both are ongoing stories defined by 1st world countries as poor per capita nations. The media’s Afghanistan immediate focus is currently on refugees storming a nearby airport escaping a threat. In Myanmar, the story is about genocide and exporting close to 1 million Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh. Meanwhile, in Myanmar, a military government remains in control so far. In Afghanistan, the political outcome is yet to be determined. (a sarcastic remark I could make here would be ‘goat herders with guns & cell phones’, okay, not constructive in any way, and probably considered racist) The point is a fair media quiz would no doubt reveal a vast dearth of knowledgeable information regarding both stories, no matter what the personal takeaways.
How people mentally process these stories can be dependent on media emphasis, not necessarily any in-depth analysis. This kind of storytelling can encourage keeping people siloed in thought traps. It’s also helping to keep modern desperate media organizations big and small afloat or even raking in profits.
