"THE" news

Now about those D&D druids...

- hold on a sec, fam wants to chat...

 

...ah-huh... the family dog barfed up part of a chew toy... neighbours took down their holiday decorations... yet another family member has acquired a bad hip... wait, wait, what's that last thing again? It's raining in Europe? Which country? Oh, all of them?

It is apparently raining in Europe. And snowing. And freezing. And flooding. For a week now. Huh. You don't say. Apparently Sweden even had to close roads due to snow and cold, which is like hearing Neverland pirates can't sail through all the fairy dust. Yes, we knew there was a problem, but has it gotten that bad? Seems like the sort of thing that usually pops up in news summaries. We sure as hell have heard of Japan's latest earthquake, even though... it's Japan... why do you think anime has so many one-panel scenes? The ground your screen is sitting on should be supplying the motion. We even heard about the earthquake in Afghanistan months ago, even though, hell, that's the least of THEIR worries. Last month we heard about the Siberian winter being winter in Siberia. Quakes, floods, blizzards, tornadoes, reporters love talking about natural disasters, and the weather in particular. It's sensationalism and human interest with no need to piss off any crime syndicates by reporting on their misdeeds and no-one can argue that it is, legitimately, news.

Yet for once, they're showing uncharacteristic restraint. All of them. All. Of. Them. At least here in the States, Europe getting increasingly flooded from the fjords to Bosphorous warrants barely a curt, bashful glimpse, if that. Oh, they'll have one article buried somewhere in page fifty-seven, nowhere near as important as "thirty years of Golden Globe fashion." You can't accuse them of not doing their jobs... technically. But front pages conspicuously avoid treating this as an over-arching problem, like, say, maybe, atmospheric currents driven by temperature gradients might be shifting. I'm not surprised by our "big three" (CBS/NBC/ABC) as their idea of international news has always treated even Canada like some strange, exotic netherworld. But Reuters, CNN, BBC, hell, even Wikipedia's front page ongoing events? Nothing up front? Anywhere? The Associated Press site did run a couple articles three days ago. EuroNews presents the problem as "across Europe" though I suppose with "Euro" in the name that's the only one that couldn't avoid it.

 

Otherwise it hath been decreed, to journalism as a whole, that Americans shall pay no attention to the rains in plain.

Meanwhile, my local squirrel population is still busily rampaging through leaf litter in January like it's November.

Oh, look, someone built a highway to hell-if-I-care-what-season-it-is.