The premise of the article is incredibly stupid into a super-dimensional level of stupidity unheard of before.
It is not news that people die. Everybody dies. You who are reading this is going to die. I am going to die. Every person you have ever heard of and not heard of is going to die.
Terrorism and homicide are not natural causes of death, and naturally upsetting and naturally newsworthy.
Unless the authors of the article want the news to make headlines that people die of natural causes, then we can only interpret it that they want to tone down deaths by homicide and terrorism and try to paint those happenings as "no big deal". Which might very well be the cause among the sick dimension of top academia.
We definitely should adjust coverage of homicide (by either tone, volume, who knows) until people are no longer disproportionately living in fear of it or in fear of cities.
But of course that won't happen because nurturing the fear is the point, it's how they control people.
All homicides should be reported in the news. At least in the local news. These are things that are very important locally, although generally not nationally.
Even if you could ban all news in an effort to make everybody live as enlightened hackers with disregard to worldly matters, you would still find that homicide is news which spreads like wildfire through word of mouth. It has been like this for hundreds of thousands of years.
If it's a friend or family member then I'll find out without it being on the news. A random one-off murder is neither interesting nor useful to me unless there's a pattern to it which could threaten me, which is very rarely the case. Living in fear is a choice.
I guess it depends on how atomized you are. Where I live, knowing who and where are the drug dealers and what people are involved in homicide have very real consequences for families and the choices you make for your children.
I think it's very lame of you and other people to try to call it "living in fear". Wouldn't you like to know about for example a wave of robberies or burglaries happening near to where you live? Living in fear is when you are worried about things on the other side of the world, and such. Local news is not fear mongering. It is structured delivery of information which would have been delivered as gossip anyway.
Not to mention that news exposure helps the police finding dangerous criminals or finding more witnesses. For example serial rapists commonly use the same method with various random victims who are not aware of each other. Once the police and prosecution can connect several victims to the same perpetrator, they will have a very strong case.
Of course you will scoff at all this, since you personally might not have been the victim of violent crime, and therefore couldn't care less. But other people haven't reached that level of rational elevation yet.
I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons to fear and want to be alert and informed, I'm saying that Fox News etc. magnify and prey on this by making people think they'll be shot five minutes after they step off a plane in Philadelphia. Awareness of safety should be a part of our lives, but it shouldn't be a culture war.
>Where I live, knowing who and where are the drug dealers and what people are involved in homicide have very real consequences for families and the choices you make for your children.
That's the thing: the (brown/poor) drug dealers that the local media tend to report on are typically not the majority of drug dealers. They're just the ones that are picked up by the police. Thats the whole point of the article we are all commenting on.
Your kids are more likely to be enticed into drugs by their friends, not by some rando on a street corner.
>Living in fear is when you are worried about things on the other side of the world, and such.
That's merely one type of living in fear.
>Local news is not fear mongering.
"The Haitian immigrants are eating the neighborhood cats and dogs". Yup, definitely not fear mongering.
>It is structured delivery of information which would have been delivered as gossip anyway.
Local news = gossip. This is not the dunk you think it is.
>Not to mention that news exposure helps the police finding dangerous criminals
Seems like a stretch
>For example serial rapists commonly use the same method with various random victims who are not aware of each other.
For known occurrences, I'd expect the police to be more aware of the full details than the local media, if only by sheer numbers. Cops probably outnumber local crime beat reporters by at least a factor of 10.
>Once the police and prosecution can connect several victims to the same perpetrator, they will have a very strong case.
Leaves out the whole suspect identification part of the process.
>Of course you will scoff at all this, since you personally might not have been the victim of violent crime, and therefore couldn't care less. But other people haven't reached that level of rational elevation yet.
I.e., living in fear. It's certainly less irrational than, say, someone who has not been a crime victim, I'll give you that. I'm sorry that you were a victim of violent crime, as your comment implies, but in all statistical likelihood the (local) news would not have prevented your victimization.
Most deaths attributed to heart diseases are not natural at all, and I would argue it's the same for a lot of cancer cases.
Just a hundred years ago, they were unheard of. Our lifestyle and diet is what is killing us and some very big drinks and food companies have everything to gain from that. They are not natural deaths.
The premise of the article is that this kind of reporting has actual policy effects. You just just missed their point because of your disdain for their "super-dimensional level of stupidity".
It is not news that people die. Everybody dies. You who are reading this is going to die. I am going to die. Every person you have ever heard of and not heard of is going to die.
Terrorism and homicide are not natural causes of death, and naturally upsetting and naturally newsworthy.
Unless the authors of the article want the news to make headlines that people die of natural causes, then we can only interpret it that they want to tone down deaths by homicide and terrorism and try to paint those happenings as "no big deal". Which might very well be the cause among the sick dimension of top academia.