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. 

Missing Quality

I feel like I'm picking on a retard every time I write about YLE. It seems their feed really doesn't allow you to look at all the news with a straight face. I understand the point of having a cute animal at the end of a news broadcast, but on the Internet and especially in the feed form I don't get it.

Specifically? I'm looking at a piece where they've opened an Elf Academy in Italy to support the Santa School in Rovaniemi. Everyone should stop reading the article right at the title, but since I already started I've now learned how the school is in Noventa di Piave near Venice and ...

I'm not going to go there. The article is utterly worthless. It is not funny, it is not informative, interesting or in any way valuable. It comes with a video attachment, which is not narrated or subtitled, it doesn't have a description and it might well be Christmas stock footage from anywhere in southern Europe.

Here is the video, no Finnish language skill necessary.
http://www.yle.fi/java/areena/dispatcher/2623467.asx?bitrate=1000000

The second quality point I want to bring up is I've read of an incident where several Finnish newspapers just took an article from our largest, and when it turned out false they either didn't publish a correction or it wasn't enough to undo the damage. It's not all good in our printed media either.

Helsingin Sanomat (#1 newspaper) said The Social Insurance Institution of Finland (KELA) was found guilty in the European Human Rights Court - in reality they linked the wrong judgment to the wrong case. The turd of a report then made the rounds and ended up in 4 more papers.

Helsingin Sanomat made a mistake and the other papers just copy pasted the story without checking the background.

Both of these cases are similar in that they reveal a lack of professionalism. In the case of YLE it feels like they are whipping monkeys tied to typewriters to fill a quota, while the newspaper reporters hit "Copy" when the coffee break ends. This is what passes for news around here, but it's not much better elsewhere and I'll get to that too.