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I was interested in this via Boing Boing because it gels with a slowly forming hypothesis that I've had inexorably spreading in my brain for some time. That we have nothing to fear but news itself.
Ever since the advent of 24 hour rolling news the motivation to fill the 24 hour schedule with anything and everything however crass or alarmist is proving irrestistable to whoever produces it. Hence the point that News helped to stimulate the climate in which the poisonous thinking that led to the sub-prime crisis and also, when push came to shove, turned the escalating financial markets into reverse far more rapidly than they would otherwise have managed without nightly promotion on our TVs.
The problem is that, somewhat like the banks, insurance and mortgage companies, 24 hour rolling news is in a no loose situation. Whatever happens is grist to their mill. In the same way that newspapers frightened the parents of young children into avoiding the MMR vaccine and thus stimulated a measles epidemic which they then reported with equal glee , the credit crunch shows the same cause and effect cycle. The media get copy whatever the story - news on the fat cats, news on the unemployed and who can say, hand on heart, that they are not thoroughly sick of Robert Peston and the emmisaries of doom that parade across our screens every night. You know, the ones you appear to delight in news of the recession to the extent that they predicted it for 3 months before it actually arrived and when it did almost rubbed their hands and said 'I told you so.'
So here's my answer to doom and gloom. Shoot every news anchor, financial analyst, link man, reporter and news producer you can get into your cross-hairs. Yes. Do shoot the messenger because they're no longer just messengers are they? They are the fulfillers of their own prophesies. They deserve to be killed to death.
