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The News Media Gets It Wrong, Again
Why the Vance ploy, the Trump baby temper-tantrum, and Zelensky’s behavior made no real difference
It’s not easy working for a supposed “news” organization. Your content is competing with every mindless TikTok video, every social media viral trend, every X-twitter ultra-far-right vomit, and every piece of vacuous celebrity gossip that perpetually clamors for attention on people’s flickering shiny screens. Billions of humans spend much of their non-work waking lives gawping empty-headed at worthless content and somehow the “news” has to grab a second or two of monetizable attention in this perpetual tsunami of mental trash.
Not one person in ten thousand cares about context and not one person in one hundred thousand is willing to make the slightest intellectual effort. Consequently, “newsworthy” items must always be totally non-challenging from a cognitive perspective. This is why airplane crashes, celebrity scandals, natural disasters, mass shootings, the early stage of any war, and all the other staples of the “news” organizations are so helpful: they provide instant context-free sensation that can be gawped at for a few seconds of thought-free distraction. To ensure no cognitive workload will be imposed at any time, the “news” organizations are careful to frame the vacuous sensationalism…
