Word: media
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...live every week like it's Shark Week, then, might be a metaphor for living in our media environment: to spend every week titillated by unlikely threats, getting whipped into frenzies, yawning over high-minded stuff like health-care policy and supping from the delicious chum bucket of hysteria. The President is a secret Kenyan who faked his birth certificate! Terrorists are coming to get you! And the world is going to end, six different ways! But first a word from our sponsor...
Coincidentally, one of the best recent critiques of how media overkill works is airing during Shark Week. Summer is high season for media freak-outs. This year, we've had celebrity deaths, political sex scandals and a conspiracy theory that President Obama was born outside the U.S., revived by the likes of CNN's Lou Dobbs. Sharkbite Summer (Aug. 4) looks back eight years to when a few high-profile shark attacks sent the media into their own feeding frenzy. The summer of 2001, postrecount and pre-9/11, was notoriously slow on news. (Hence, it was also the season...
...fear and fetishize them over more likely but duller threats; that's a common flaw of risk assessment. Ideally, the media should help us place our worries in perspective. But often they encourage the disaster mentality by focusing on the trendy menace--the sleeper cell, the Obama-conspiracy e-mails, the pandemic, the shark--jumping on hot-button distractions and rushing to label every new crisis the worst ever...
...Shanghai Easing the One-Child Policy? Reports surfaced in international media that in an effort to respond to the rapid graying of the workforce, some couples in China's most populous city would be encouraged to have two kids. Shanghai officials denied any policy shift, but rumors persist that Beijing might be rethinking its controversial population-control policy...
...Media...