I’m starting to read all news as pretty much the same these days:
David Cameron says he will fight to protect the UK national interest in discussions over a new EU Treaty but Ed Miliband says the UK is being “left on the sidelines”.
comes out as
David Cameron says something he thinks the public wants to hear, while Ed Miliband says something designed to make him look proactive.
Every day, about every thing.
This.
These papers are, of course, always desperate to run breathless stories about minors being subjected to:
Any five-year-old in the country who happens to be in a shop at any point today is going to see a battered and bloody corpse on the front of those same publications, which are usually kept at floor level.
Good work, team.
It’s like it’s still the Cold War, and everyone is afraid of abrupt nuclear explosions and slow death by radiation. People associate “radiation” and “nuclear” with “bomb”, because the only time anything relating to these terms is reported in the news, it is about something bad. Usually either an explosion, or a poisoning.
The recent situation at Fukushima in Japan gave reporters both, of course, which I’m sure they loved. Why, this hysteria practically creates itself*.
*It doesn’t.
As did Chernobyl, although back then, there was no 24 hour rolling news to keep the hysteria level up. Chernobyl is particularly interesting, and I’d encourage anyone to read up on it, there’s plenty of material around the web to start with. What’s most interesting to know, though, is that people seem to constantly expect nuclear-related things to explode, when in fact they just can’t or won’t. Chernobyl was a steam explosion, not a nuclear explosion. Fukushima was some loose hydrogen igniting. The real risk is a leak of radiation, which news agencies also misreport as being lethal/non-lethal, without mentioning the time factor. A lethal dose is only a lethal dose after a certain amount of time. Jamming your hand in a fire for half a second is nothing like as bad as leaving it in there for an hour.
And so to today’s news of a Swedish man attempting to build a nuclear reactor in his house. Here are two of the questions the BBC interviewer asked:
“But the difficulty is, if you had achieved your aim of splitting the atom, you would have killed yourself in the process, wouldn’t you?”
“Do you live with anybody else, any neighbours that could have been affected if you had managed to create this explosion?”
Yes, if it’s nuclear, it has to be about explosions and death. Even if you don’t know much about the topic, the clue is in what he was was arrested for: possessing nuclear material, not trying to cause an explosion.
Germany’s government, a country whose nuclear reactors are at, shall we say, a lesser risk of an earthquake and tsunami, has decided that it’s now too risky to have nuclear power at all. Build them right, Germany, and you’ll be fine. Additionally, is coal pollution somehow risk-free? No problem there? Doesn’t matter, because news-fuelled nuclear hysteria can take hold at any time, and it can lose your government precious votes if you aren’t seen to be having a knee-jerk reaction.
Also, because I’m me, this totally reminded me of that episode of Stargate SG-1 where some guy builds a stargate in Sam’s basement out of bits of old toasters and stuff ordered off the internet.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/267730/news/epic-gears-of-war-3-delay-not-a-quality-issue/
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/290436/news/gears-of-war-3-release-date-confirmed-for-september-20/
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/267702/news/gears-of-war-3-delayed-by-minimum-of-5-months/
Apple released another product in January, but it’s not for the general public, it’s specifically tailored for IT News outlets. It’s called iNews, and it allows journalists to automatically generate articles based around Apple products, without any thought required. In the absence of any actual news, iNews can furnish even the laziest journalist with several paragraphs of aimless text.
Let’s look at some of the output from iNews that’s been appearing on major “news” sites.
