News is a funny business, as I may have mentioned earlier in this series of short blogs, and broadcast news is extremely funny (or perhaps peculiar is a better term).
The national half hour news reports have to be very careful with how they allocate their non-commercial time, which makes the job more about curating than reporting. Hardly anything from the pool of potential news stories makes the cut for each day.
Kathleen has been observing a trend on some national news reports, where each evening there has been a story about one or two hospitalized vaccine deniers. She notes that the pattern tends to be one person who regrets not getting the vaccine and who vows to do so once out of hospital. The other proudly proclaims that HE (and it's always a "he") will never take the vaccine. Death holds no fear for him, I guess.
There are all sorts of related stories, mainly with recent widows or grieving mothers telling the reporter that their family really misses (insert name of deceased anti-vaxxer here) and that she is angry that she couldn't persuade the man to get vaccinated.
What's funny about these reports, you ask? Broadcast news includes very tight "gatekeeping," or choosing what to include in the program and what to leave out. News stories about 35-year-old males in Alabama who proudly proclaim their freedom to choose and who have mild cases of Covid are just not very dramatic. Not dramatic or unusual or associated with a celebrity? You're not getting on the news, though your personal story is true.
I read today that many experts are now resigned to an ongoing pandemic that is much more dangerous to certain groups (who happen to not be well-off white people). Most of the world has decided that their patience has run out and that everyone will just have to live with high infection rates, while we continue to keep hospitalizations and deaths under control.
Humans being a somewhat irrational species, maybe a controlled "kill off" is the best we can hope for. Average life expectancy dropped about two years in the U.S. in 2020, and I assume will drop some more as the drug overdoses and Covid deaths continue to pile up.
Some Americans have opted for "I don't care" as their mantra. It sounds like being tough, though dying patients on ventilators don't seem so tough in their last moments.
So it goes.
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