Two minute silence

[ciphergoth]

At 12:00 BST today, London and many around the world observed a two minute silence for the 48 people who died in the terrorist attacks on London on 7 July.

During those two minutes, approximately 42 children worldwide died due to poverty.

We are not going to let terrorists cause us to lose perspective.

Comments

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Hm.
True, those who are motivated can seek out a more full understanding of what's happening in the world. But here, at least, there are still a heck of a lot of people who get their news from broadcast media, which will run off together and focus for weeks on some celebrity trial or one missing person and then not bother to cover what's going on in the legislature. It's maddening.

Part of why I wish the broadcast folks would make more of an attempt to cover pending legislation or give more broad analysis of world events is that so many people will only seek news from sources they match politically. And then we end up with situations like we had in the US where people who planned to vote for Bush often assumed he supported the policies they supported, when he often did not (that PIPA report about separate realities).

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is a fair point. But do you not think people will do this anyway? Most of us are guilty of confirmation bias in some way or another. Then again, I would agree that that's no reason for the media not to try harder.

Mind you, most media outlets are either commercial organisations or competing with commercial organisations. So perhaps we can't expect too much from them. The people get what the people want...

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's been termed the "balkanization" of the media. At least 30 years ago when there were only the couple networks people were creating their differing opinions off of the same information.

Now the information is fragmented and polarized. I'm not sure how this can be rectified.

And yes. Some time in the last 15 to 20 years the news segment of the media stopped being seen as a public duty and necessary cost center to being instead a profit center. Worse, consolidation of the media companies means that there are far fewer foreign desk reporters now than there were even 10 years ago. Coverage suffers, and more organizations rely on the same few journalistic sources.