Drowning Refugees and Drowning the Articles About Those Refugees

If you follow English language news coverage, read newspapers especially in England or in general keep yourself up to date you have probably by now seen the photograph of the drowned boy on the beach. I'll refrain here, you can find it easily.

If we accept BBC's summary, Europe is in the middle of a refugee crisis. European nations are trying to deal with and failing in dealing with an unprecedented amount of people fleeing their respective home countries in hopes of a safer life within EU.

Vice news, which I hold in a high regard recently posted a documentary series titled Europe or Die which portrays the terrible risks fleeing people take, failed European rescue and processing efforts, the poor conditions in reception centers and illegal pushbacks.

Awareness is, hopefully, growing around this issue and more importantly hopefully European nations can get their act together. The situation is dire.

But not every news outlet reports on this with such clarity as Vice and BBC do. I was jarred to read a daily "Fresh News" section from our main Finnish daily Helsinki Times. It was on a big screen at my work and it had nothing on the issue, or any real issue for that matter. There was the usual tripe, local small story news and domestic politics. They had a higher priority in reporting Rovio, the irate bird company laying off staff than much anything else.

I believe this is because news screens, say on your smart TV, pick up articles based on category only, and equally pick up articles from each category for the main page. Say you get a local news story, one from abroad, weather, sports, entertainment and most likely something tagged funny. This is then collected and the most recent articles are displayed. Can you see what this leads to?

Any "smart" system might inadvertently downgrade an entire issue with status quo news. There is no priority or importance tagged, there is only the genre and the newest get displayed first. Certainly, a major article on a refugee crisis takes longer to produce an interview with a former soccer player and the automated systems we use know no better than to display whatever is fresh.

Actually, some websites themselves are no better. The main page of Helsinki Times looked like this today:

Worthless. Compared to what is happening around us Jari Litmanen talking about how he is bad with computers is absolutely worthless and there goes the site with it.

Anything to take home? Don't follow a single outlet I suppose, and consider what quantity of which loose genre of news you browse. Do reflect on the importance of news independently, not based on what is displayed full screen. 

No Link Between Cannabis Attitudes and Use?

Two news posts in brief. First, YLE reported that the Finnish youths have relaxed their attitude towards cannabis use in general. They continue that this change does not reflect in the amount of drug use.

The next post, same day, on the same subject says 2010 cannabis confiscations reached a record high.

According to YLE a youth researcher commented nothing radical is happening, and that running a campaign saying "one out of every five youngsters has tried cannabis" can cause unecessary panic. They talk about how the media is interested in the topic only if they can report increases.

The second article surely fits the bill. It says the police discovered an unprecedented amount of grow-ops. Oh, and they also mention how drug trafficking is mostly organized crime and strongly connected to international criminal organizations.

But wait, in the first article, you can read on how we saw growing usage numbers from 1990-2000 and how usage has since stopped increasing in any major way. After that, I don't suppose the points they raise about designer drugs or anything else really makes sense. What a mess.

Cheap? You Judge

So, the opossum Heidi made it on the main page of YLE News tonight. Why is Heidi the opossum special, you might wonder - well, she's not, her eyes are crooked and that is all.

Actually, I feel doing this cheapens my own site. Every time YLE picks up something completely useless for their main page and I post about I feel like picking on a retard. We've long since established they don't know any better and they can't help it. Also, it feels like a cheap outlet if I don't have a serious news post to point out, like the last one on Haiti

Now there might be a counterpoint or two floating around. First, you might claim the joke at the end of a news reel serves a purpose and that there's a long history for it and that it increases the amount of viewers for the actual news. This held true in the age of television, but not the Internet, why?

Today a newsreader selects a news website because he or she is interested in the news. They do not necessarily seek cute-animals-on-demand, as they can do that any time on youtube or any number of other sites. When you go to a news website you want news. If you play the tradition card, you need to understand how the Internet is not the television and that readership and content is not necessarily dependent on the same factors. Think about it - the news reel at 22:00 ends in a joke and you feel good at the end because you watched the whole thing. Reading Internet news you don't have a single cohesive transmission, you pick and choose, and this brings us back to the first point; news websites should offer news instead of cutesy crap.

I also realize some viewers might want to see animal shenanigans amid news. There are various online sites making their livelihood out of it, so why shouldn't news providers do it too? Because our main national news provider should not aim for the lowest common denominator, they should aim to bring us quality news. The yellow press exist to fill that function, entertainment news.

Haiti Aid Did Not Go to Haiti

Remeber Haiti? Remember how a long time ago I posted on how foreign aid had failed before and how we should expect it to fail again.

This time it's Time kicking the article around, but they have a fact I hadn't run in to before which bears to be repeated:

Only 10% of the foreign aid to Haiti was actually spent there.

After this it should come as no surprise nothing worth noting in the way of rebuilding a nation happened after the earthquake. 12,000 NGO's in a country, millions of dollars in contracts given to U.S. companies instead of Haiti ones, a cholera epidemic and a government which has relinquished control to the NGO's largely when they should've been in charge.

It doesn't sound like a place which needs more foreign money, now does it? There was a lesson to be learnt there, and there is a lesson to be learnt now, too bad it is the same lesson.