But we keep putting it off

Oh, we genuinely want to be honest, I assure you, but we keep putting it off.

Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Raw Youth (1875)

As we know, many thing we focus on beyond our own environs are not what we would pay attention to without endless media pressure. Daniel Kahneman has called it availability – we focus on what is available for us to focus on. Mainstream media plus their online collaborators know it well.

We even have to focus on the media to remind ourselves why we'd prefer not to focus on the media. Like the call of an excited child it goes look at this, look at this, look at this and like a child it never seems to pause for breath. In the end we just have to take a peek, if only to assure ourselves that nothing bad is going on, nobody has fallen downstairs and the house is still intact.

With all the noise distracting us from the rise of global fascism, it is worth asking how much reality is reflected by the mainstream media. Ignore it and life goes on apart from the wind turbines on the hill, residual lockdown silliness, face masks and memories of that temporary lack of toilet paper and closed businesses and takeout only cafes, and, and… And somebody wants our attention don’t they? At almost any cost they must have our attention because without it they go under.

Yet imagine a situation where the mainstream media focus on global car accidents for months on end. Numerous accidents are described in minute detail from the people involved and their personal tragedies, blighted hopes and fractured lives, to the condition of the roads, make of vehicle and of course what could have been done better and it’s all the government’s fault anyway.

In addition we’d have interviews and opinion from an array of astoundingly confident experts plus numerous proposed solutions and draconian mitigation policies from road safety lobbies, politicians and absolutist lunatics. We’d have numerous charts of accident statistics, constant references to children and horrendous future accident predictions if nothing is done. Maybe some models too.

Road accidents kill, main and injure huge numbers of people every year, blighting lives, destroying careers, totting up huge costs in hospital care, road safety initiatives, policing and wrecked vehicles. Globally this is a bigger issue than a relatively benign pandemic, a few race riots and some damaged statues, yet we are persuaded to direct our attention to the pandemic and the riots but not the traffic.  

In which case what is the lesson? To my mind it is more evidence that we are manipulated by taking advantage of the way we navigate through life by avoiding surprises. Surprises in this manipulative sense are mostly threats. To those not directly involved, serious traffic accidents are not surprising but a key point is surely this - the media cannot make them surprising. It is perhaps unfortunate that the media cannot make them threatening either.

For that they go elsewhere and this is where media mendacity becomes a feature of the process. To make us pay attention they need an endless supply of fictitious threats rather than genuine ones. Fictitious threats allow the media to use the infinite resources of fiction rather than a far more constrained and understandable reality.

Political convictions, social prejudices, financial anxieties plus emotional needs and fears all supply the nutrients to concoct fictitious threats and make them easily available. This allows the media to feed us with a constant stream of them to which we inevitably pay attention because it is in our nature to pay attention to threats, even fictitious threats. Availability again.

Unfortunately for mainstream media, the internet has made all this threatening urgency too familiar and for more and more people the threats are seeping away as they did decades ago with traffic accidents. To counter that we see more extreme political rhetoric as previously middle of the road political parties drift towards a kind of modern fascism in their desperate need to attract the attention of voters – to make themselves available.

The current hysteria towards Donald Trump is an extreme political competition among attention whores trying to make his somewhat benign presidency into a seething morass of fictitious threats to trigger susceptible voting behaviour. That has always been the aim as he knows.

All very basic but perhaps that has become a media problem as well as ours. It is basic enough to become visible. A patchy visibility perhaps, but maybe the fog will continue to clear.