Rank news
Today it's hard to find a publication, either mainstream or alternative, which is not covering the inauguration. If you dig a bit, there are much more important stories about human suffering, which deserve far more attention and action.But people focus instead on the presidency. This lets Bush's folks set the agenda, and the framework.
We really need a news site that weighs world news based on, for example, death. That's awfully morbid. But disease, starvation, war, genocide, mass poisoning, accidents, disasters etc. are surely where we need to focus attention. Not on the people in power. If we concentrate on creating a truly global view, the crimes of the rulers will be more obvious.
This news tends not to be timely. See Google News searches for massacre, genocide or famine. Or they are watered down to irrelevance, because they are cliches or metaphors, such as plague.
But it is interesting to combine all these terms in a Google news search. This gives us a kind of "disaster trends" index. For example, when I posted this, "torture" and "disaster" were way ahead of "massacre", "genocide", "famine" etc. Interesting for news analysis, which I know is the point of this blog. But not that interesting from the point of view of getting a real picture. We'd have to compile the top stories in each subject.
posted by Greg Bryant @ 1:34 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home