I’m pointing this out because I never noticed it before, and I bet most of the country doesn’t know it exists, either.
FoxNews.com actually has an entire section of the website dedicated to Disasters.
No wonder so many of its readers are paranoid… how does one comment about this? Comparison is always a good place to start:
The FoxNews.com US News Sections are (this is sort of amazing, actually):
Crime, Terrorism, Economy, Immigration, Disasters, Military, Education, Environment, Personal Freedoms, Regions, and Smarter America
That Terrorism, Disasters, and Personal Freedoms all get top billing is… well, sums up Fox’s agenda in a nutshell. In contrast, the NBCNews.com’s US News Sections are:
Life, Crime & Courts, Environment, Giving, Security, and Weird News.
As always, words and ideas that face us daily are important. It’s pretty easy to see why the Fox faction ends up screaming at people all day long, while the NBC side watches Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
If you look closely at the image of the FoxNews site (clicking it will enlarge), website visitors can even “like” each disaster on facebook. “Ohh! That’s a great drowning, (like)” and, “Yes, I like those remains found in a duffle bag (like)”. My mind is having trouble with this concept. I have to file people who like the FoxNews.com Disaster section under Weird News on the NBC site.
We are a strange country, indeed. I’ve lived in enough big cities to have seen dozens of traffic jams from people slowing down to see the carnage of a car wreck, but that a “news” organization has dedicated this much space to constant disaster news surprises me. We are human and seem to be strangely drawn to bad news, but we can also try to teach one another to be better humans by not promoting or force feeding it. (Yes, I know that’s an old argument, but that doesn’t make it untrue.)
I wonder what the daily life of the Fox News Disaster Section’s editor must be like? Bummer gig.
