Page 125 of the latest issue of The
Economist has a very interesting summary image of the 4
million online journalism articles, published
during 2019 on 5000 sites. A Great Black Hole of public
attention, from which scarcely anything emerges unscathed, is
constituted by articles featuring the name of Mr. Donald Trump,
amassing an impressive 112 million hours of readership. In stark
contrast, incidents such as the Amazon, California, and Australia
fires garnered less than 10 percent of that cumulative reading time.
Even events detailing misfortunes in third-world countries receive
considerably less attention than these wildfires.
That image also shows that the world event
that gathered the most hours of reading was not the collapse of a mud dam in
Brazil nor the tropical cyclone Idai in Mozambique that killed more than a
thousand people but the burning of a cathedral in Paris. It is also because
of this that the so-called "Conference of Parties" -COP, has all
been a failure due to the inherent nature of
addressing issues primarily affecting impoverished individuals in the
developing world — often referred to as the 'Untermensch of the
21st century.' Regrettably, these vulnerable populations are not even
granted the minimum reading hours in the media that truly hold
significance.
