Of course there is another hot item in the news
Over the last few years, I’ve seen quite a few people express outrage at the media “taking our attention with the next big story”. It’s often framed as a way to hide “what’s really going on”, but I see it simply as media outlets doing their job.
A great example of this was the Russia-Ukraine war. As COVID coverage began to die down, coverage of that conflict ramped up. Of course it did. The media isn’t out to hide some big secret agenda; they just want your attention so they can make more money.
In “Fooled By Randomness“, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says:
“People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.”
Tomorrow, next week, next year, the media will have a “big story” that you just can’t miss. It might really be a big story, it might not be, but they’ll be pushing it all the same. You may be wise to just ignore much of what the media pushes out, but either way it’s important to realize that the next big story is just the way they do their jobs.
Hmmm. The timing of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine was not a figment of the media’s need for “the next big thing”. On the other hand, perhaps the media’s need for a story became an impediment to Putin's desire for a quiet and blitzkrieg annexation of the breadbasket of Europe. If that’s the case, I say “Great”.