The Press, together with the modern-day media, is called The Fourth Estate; the fourth pillar of democracy, perhaps.

The Press has an adage, "if it bleeds, it leads", meaning the more sensational the headline, then that is what will

make front page news.

 

The flavour of the month, for the Media, is Covid-19, the latest Corona virus.  The virus is spreading, just as any

other influenza virus does, but it has caught the attention of the media, the UN, governments, and last, but not least,

the US Treasury, and all of whom have their own agenda to follow.  In the latter's case, it is usefully convenient for the

Treasury to lower the Fed Funds Rate without it being seen that it is being done in response to the US President

calling for it to lower rates, among other things.  Jerome Powell's credibility remains intact!

 

Covid-19 is a useful front-page vehicle for the Press, and is constantly being hyped up.  Yet, if the 80 000 cases

around the Chinese city of Wuhan are stripped out of the statistics, because, initially, the contagion was ignored,

and, thereafter, not treated with all seriousness by the Chinese authorities, then the resulting infections elsewhere,

and resulting deaths, are really not newsworthy.  Influenza infections and deaths are on a much greater scale.  Do

we ever read, watch or hear the media telling us this "inconvenient" fact? And, by the way, this is not to downplay the seriousness of the Covid-19 virus, it is an attempt to place it in context.  Once this is done, the media hype is obvious

for all to see.

 

Global warming - the inconvenient truth propagated, to much fanfare, by Al Gore, and, more recently, by 

Greta Thunberg, has similarly been grabbed by the UN, governments, so-called "Green" organisations, and, once

again, the Media, as a vehicle used to play out their various agendas (and please believe, they all have an agenda of one

kind or another)!  It has been hyped for all it is worth by the media, and become a modern-day tale to scare children when putting them to bed.  "If you don't go to sleep right away, the earth's temperature will be unbearable by tomorrow, and it will be your fault"!  (A bit like I was told as a child, that if I didn't eat my breakfast, for some reason children in Biafra would go hungry.  I have never been able to work out the causal link here, but I presume there is one)!

 

Of course, when sufficient statistics surfaced that the earth was not globally warming, and that, in fact, the earth was cooling, and that polar bears were not having to tread water to save their lives at the North Pole, the media, and its ardent followers, pivoted.  They dreamed up a fresh expression, "climate change", and turned up the dial that it was all the 

fault of "man"!  

 

Somehow, if indeed the climate is changing, which would appear to be a natural, as opposed to man-made phenomenon, and surely requiring a minimum of thousands of years to determine the accuracy of such a prediction, we are now bombarded with everything "green", in a belief that mankind's puny efforts at evading, or avoiding, the effects can somehow thwart universal actions by Forces of Nature.

 

The climate change narrative has now taken on its own critical mass of energy, a life of its own, and which appears to

similarly be the case with the new Corona virus, and anything which gets in the way will be steamrollered; flattened!

 

Irrespective of the arguments for or against Covid-19, or "climate change", my point is that this wonderful, democratic

institution that is the media, true to its origins in the penny press, will hype the story of the day, whatever its TRUE

VALUE, for as long as it can be sustained, (think about "Jack the Ripper, for example), or until a "worthy" replacement news item comes along, which the public will become enthralled with. 

 

And we, the doting public, simply hang on their every word!

 

If it bleeds, it leads!

Just be like me and not use the mainstream media. I don't watch tv news except Al Jazira, I don't read newspapers, I don't read magazines like Time. I don't use facebook or twitter or any of those.

I get my news info off TVF and talkback radio.

 

Sometimes I can't even listen to talkback when it gets too barmy. On TVF I can discount almost everything by certain posters and Al Jazira is about the only news channel that seems to report facts except when it comes to Trump, against whom it is extremely biased.

 

Journalism died some years ago, when it all became about ratings, and when I do look at it seems to be 90% opinion. Al Jazira doesn't need ads so it doesn't need to worry about ratings.