On 13th of November of 2015, At around 9:16 PM, three suicide bombers struck outside the
national stadium of France in Paris during a football match. That was followed by several
mass shootings and a suicide bombing. 130 people died and over 400 (413) were injured.
It was the deadliest attack in France since the Second World War.
The entire world was frightened. Many world leaders and people issued statements, condemning
the attacks and vowing to stand by and support France.
But did you know that roughly three times that number of French citizens died on that
same day from cancer? You haven’t heard about that and not a single
news channel talked about it even though that the number of people died was 3 times higher.
And that's because people die all the time from cancer. it's not breaking news, unlike
an insane man running and shooting people all around or blowing himself up.
And that's the problem with the news. News channels are not there to deliver you authentic
news that matters but rather they focus on events that would grab the most attention.
They talk about things that would make you emotional and watch more of that.
That's why when you watch the news, it feels like the world is a horrible place. People
are getting crazy all around the world because telling people that there are more likely
to die by a TV or a furniture falling at them than a terrorist act isn’t as frightening
as massive shooting.
Here in the west or the united states, people are more afraid of terrorists than cars. But
if you look at the statistics, you will give it another thought. From 1975 through the
end of 2016, 3,438 have been killed by all terrorists while over 37133 people were killed
in car accidents in 2017 alone but no one is shouting that we should abandon cars. Here
is another fun fact, you are twice likely to be killed by an animal than a terrorist.
But news that we should get rid of all animals isn’t going to get a lot of attention.
And you can't really blame them for that. It's not cheap to run a newspaper. You have
to got to hire writers, editors, graphic designers, journalists, reporters, buy a lot of expensive
equipment and rent a giant office for everyone to work in.
Someone has to pay for all of that. And since we are not ready to do that, we are not the
customers, so they have found another source of revenue which is advertising. And all that
these companies care about is to promote their products to as many people as possible. So
news organizations left with no choice to make money but to grab as much attention as
possible. Even if that means dramatizing unnecessarily news or only delivering the news that would
get most views.
And with the rise of internet, especially social media, that got even worst. Because
more people are scrolling through their newsfeed which means less people watching TV.
Internet created a huge hole in their pocket and now they have to find another way to make
money because online ads don't pay as much as TV ads.
At their peak, a 30-second TV ad during a popular show would cost you hundreds of thousands
of dollars but now with online ads, you can reach that number of viewers with a significantly
smaller cost. what do you think most companies did, they turned to the internet.
That forced news organizations to cut cost and focus more heavily on news that will generate
more attention even if they don't matter at all.
Videos with a lot of controversial statements will easily get more attention than carefully
analyzed and researched content. Social media algorithms purposefully promote
content that you are more likely to watch, thats why fake news easily get spread.
We have created an environment where it's really difficult for a professional journalist
to survive So when you are watching the news, you are
not really watching the news. But instead, you are watching a carefully created story
that has some truth to it to make you feel in a certain way so that you come back and
watch more of it. If you follow the news in such an environment,
you will mostly end up with a completely wrong perception about the world.
That's why I stopped watching the news in general and follow only what affects my life
directly and I would encourage you to do the same because it saves a lot of time.
Anyways, give this video a thumbs up if you have enjoyed, thanks for watching and I will
catch you in the next one.