The Number One New Story In Australia!?

On By southwerkIn ethics

That’s right, click over to News.com.au and Paris Hilton is the lead story. Good Grief, they are in the aftermath of an historic election.

They’ve got a guy who held a another guy as a slave turn himself in. If you want gaudy, strange news, isn’t that good enough? They have a nuclear reactor that spewed poison gas for hundred of miles from Sydney to Melbourne, and Paris Hilton is the top story. (By the way, they didn’t tell the public about the poison gas for fear of causing alarm. I don’t guess it would have been a big deal anyway. After all, the citizen of Melbourne who went to the internet for news would have had to read about Paris Hilton before he drifted down the page to the headline, Poison Gas Drifts Toward City.)

Has all news got to be on the level of short attention spanned five year old?

James Pilant

One thought on “The Number One New Story In Australia!?”

  1. Andrew's avatar Andrew

    I think the medias relationship with the public is a negative feedback loop. People will typically prefer the meaningless entertaining news over the meaningful but not so entertaining news. Therefore, ratings go up when they show news about paris hilton and they go down when the news actually reports something meaningful. The media, in turn, decides to give the people what they want (capitalism right?) and show paris hilton.

    On a side note, I do not think the world needs a “self cleaning garbage disposal”. Every year this list of the 10 most wanted inventions comes out and inventors/investors use it to gauge the potential success/failure of a product. This year, the top of that list was a self cleaning garbage disposal. After all, who wants to go through the hassle of cleaning out their own garbage cans?

    I thought about tackling this project and seeing what I could come up with (I am an engineering student afterall). But then I began to think…. does America really need something like this? Aren’t we lazy enough as is. It really doesn’t hurt me to take a hose, nozzel, soap, and a rag out and manually clean my garbage can out periodically.

    Just a tangent… sorry. Good blog though!

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