I was watching the evening news, and the first new item (long before the situation in Georgia and even before the Olympic medals) was about an electric pylon that collapsed (absolutely nobody harmed), cutting off power to high speed trains on a very travelled route in the French riviera.
Most of the footages were interviews of random people hugely pissed off because they had been stuck for two hours in a train, or had to wait for several hours in train stations with nobody able to tell them when trains would leave, etc… Nobody was stating it was only a minor inconvenience, nor mentioning that, well, accidents happen. I’ve seen the same kind of things when, say, a road is blocked during winter following a snowfall or during similar events.
I can’t help but wonder. Is the majority of people nowadays really outraged by minor inconveniences, and unable to understand the concept of “accident” or “bad weather” or are the media, in order to make a non-event into a news worthy event, actively seeking the most irate people, ignoring the wide majority of regular guys who would just shrug their shoulders?
IOW, is people’s attitude changing as much as it seems, or is it merely an illusion created by the media? (Could apply too to other kinds of events, like said a school banning ball games because a kid could be harmed, that could be representative of a social evolution, but also merely a local oddity blown out of proportion by the media).
I think it’s a side-effect of reliability, combined with self-importance. “I paid good money for this vacation, and I don’t care what the reason is. Someone gets paid to prevent these things from happening, and I want their head on a platter, in my hotel room.” Repetez, ad nauseum.
Vlad/Igor
I think that’s part of it. It’s boring to show people shrugging their shoulders and saying “no biggie,” but the pissed off people who foam at the mouth? Makes for good TV.
No doubt about it, it’s the “slow news day” effect. Any time you see a news item about routine infrastructure collapse in some far land, you’re being milked.
If you stop watching the “news” on TV (and better yet, take a 6 month TV hiatus altogether) you’ll develop a completely different world view. I recommend it.
I’m SO hoping for a slow news week. I’ll be telecommuting from home while the DNC goes on across the street from my office. (Literally. Obama’s rumored to be using that hotel as his base of operations.)
As with anything there probably is a germ of truth. Upset that some random incident caused the train to be physically incapable of moving? Probably not really. Upset that nobody was able to tell me what the hell was going on for 2 hours? Yeah, I’d more than likely be a tad irritated. I tend to get irritated at things that are preventable if someone would just think for a damn minute and use some common sense moreso than from something that nobody could predict.
I also vote for slow news day.
However, the NYC MTA pisses me off regularly. Often it’s because the train system is so large, I have options if there’s a problem on the tracks. So if they don’t tell me until after I am on a train (and in a tube underground standing in heels with someone’s purse --hopefully-- in my asscrack and an iffy AC system) that I have to get off at the next station and the train will be out of service, I get a little more than annoyed because before the train doors closed, I could have taken any number of other options as a way home.
Too right. “Minor incident occurs somewhere. Thousands of people utterly indifferent, getting on with their lives as usual. More at eleven.” Not exactly the ratings winner. It’s the same thing that leads to “adjusting for windchill, humidity and seasonal averages, the temperature tomorrow may be cold enough that oxygen will freeze out of the atmosphere!!! Tune in for updated forecast in the morning”
The TV news people don’t show interviews with ‘random’ people.
They want controversy, excitement or a good-looking woman.
As an example of how low they will sink:
**“Anyone here been raped and speak English?” ** was the war reporter’s irreverent but eminently practical question, and became the title of his book. The question was shouted out to hundreds of just rescued European survivors of a siege at Stanleyville in eastern Congo in November 1964 as they disembarked from US Air Force C-130s landing.
There must be some kind of corollary: people complain louder on camera. The loudest complainers make the evening news.