Mark Shea is connecting the pitching of dog food with the pitching of news... and it's brilliant in my view:
Did you ever notice that dog food looks, you know, rather appetizing on dog food commercials? That’s because dogs don’t buy dog food. People buy dog food. So you pitch the content to the people, not the dogs.
In the same way, our manufacturers of information pitch their “news” to the obsessions of their viewers, not to actually telling us what’s going on. So, for instance, in our post-Christian, sex-obsessed culture, you find that NBC is spending 13X more coverage on Russian anti-gay legislation than on attacks on Syrian Christians. Why? Because the denizens of 30 Rock and their peer group are obsessed with sexual libertinism and could not care less about about a bunch of Syrian Christians getting slaughtered. And they don’t see why you would care either. So the decision is made for us as to what constitutes “news”. Sex is appetitizing. Death, not so much (unless they can get some cool footage of people being killed). But that would require NBC journos being in harm’s way and about the biggest hardship they want to deal with is a hotel in Russia.
Take what Mark's writing about there and relate it to the non-stop coverage of Michael Sam. I'm counting nearly 100,000 results when doing a Google News Search on the man. Not quite 3,400 hits when looking for Christians Slaughtered in Syria.
There's something wrong with this picture.
We are playing up manufactured victimhood while ignoring real victims.
Why is that?
Is this not an accurate indication of how sick our culture is? Michael Sam has become for many a cultural icon and hero and yet we know not the name of a single martyred Christian in Syria.
God forgive us.