The “world’s happiest country” myth lives on year after year after year. Finland now pretends it knows why it was identified as “the world’s happiest country”. In fact, the metrics used to determine “happiest” have nothing to do with happiest. The “happiest” title was promoted as sounding better than a metric that measured “well-being” based on things having nothing to do with happiness!
Media caught making up new scary disease “White lung syndrome” to describe well known “walking pneumonia”.
Wow. If you live a really long ways from a trauma center then you live a really long ways away from a trauma center. Apparently, little populated areas should have the same hospitals as bigger cities.
In the 1990s, NBC News claimed Chevrolet trucks exploded upon crash impacts. NBC News staged a crash with hidden igniters and an intentional fuel leak to get their “video proof” but was eventually caught for faking the video. The NBC News president and 3 producers were fired, the reporter was moved to a local TV station, and NBC agreed to pay all legal costs.
Social media is no longer about posting your homemade videos on Youtube – now, most successful videos are from those with professional production quality.
David Axe, the reporter who has spent years writing basically the same story week after week about Covid, with hysterical, fear-inducing and wrong headlines, is back at it again!
Washington Post’s expert reporter on food wrote an entire book that she later concluded was completely wrong. The problem may be that she has no formal training in food, nutrition or health – she has a BA in English.
Who reports the news? Surprisingly, and especially at national levels and national “news” web sites, a disproportionate number of reporters have very elite backgrounds, having attended private (and expensive) universities, studying and working abroad. 77% have a BA in the humanities – typically English lit, history and so on. Their backgrounds are quite different than those of their audience. This may lead to having a skewed perspective on life and news. This is an issue the industry itself is aware of – but their idea of diversity does not address their mono culture.
Nothing like being off by 1000x.
Since 2000, news headlines have become increasingly negative, angry, sad, disgusted and fearful in their wording. Obviously, this affects the mental health of news readers.