
Media Can’t Stop Presenting Horrifying Stories as ‘Uplifting’ Perseverance Porn - joeyespo
https://fair.org/home/media-just-cant-stop-presenting-horrifying-stories-as-uplifting-perseverance-porn/
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wazoox
Generally speaking, the mainstream media do whatever is possible to hide away
serious politics and social issues under a veil of entertainment, voyeurism,
or pornography. Whatever serious issue is at take is dumbed down until it's
completely harmless. Healthcare. Gun violence. Plutocracy. Corruption. The
death or democracy and rise of a new feudalism. Imperialism and endless war.
Climate change and fossil fuel industry. All of the details of these are
turned into entertaining stories, preventing people from going to the
pitchforks.

You know the famous Henry Ford quote: "It is well enough that people of the
nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I
believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."

~~~
mistermann
This here is the exact problem. Imagine the world as an IT project, is this
how anyone here would run it? Is this how ideas should be communicated? It's
so obviously theatre, how so few people can see it boggles the mind.

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liberte82
I see you haven't seen the IT projects I've been part of. ;)

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Ididntdothis
I feel a lot of these stories are about people trying to survive in
dysfunctional environments. The other type of story they like to publish is
about the glamouros lives of rich people.

What seems to be taboo is to connect these two together. You have one group of
people who don't get even the most basic healthcare or go into debt over
school lunches and then you have others who have more luxury you can imagine.
But somehow it’s not ok to point out that maybe one has to do with the other.

It seems to me a lot of these stories are about telling poor people “stop
complaining and be as resourceful as the people we are writing about. And
certainly don’t ask your boss for more money or your politicians for doing a
better job”

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Entalpi
This reminds me of whenever someone creates a Gofund me for health reasons. It
seems a bit alien to me still as a European that people need to go beg on the
internet in order to not be financially ruined by healthcare costs. :-(

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Mirioron
It's probably alien because you haven't looked around. In quite a few European
countries you can easily end up in a situation with no healthcare available to
you other than the ER (eg if you're unemployed but don't get unemployment
benefits). It's also not unheard of that people just can't afford treatment
for their illness or even worse - the treatment just isn't available.

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pornel
Availability of ER is still incredibly important. Nobody will refuse to be
taken to hospital if they're in serious condition.

In my experience from Poland, people who lose health coverage find a way to
get it back if they really need it. Get _any_ legal job, enrol in school,
apply for disability, etc. Sometimes pleading with the staff to skip the
eligibility check works, too. And if everything else fails, the out-of-pocket
costs aren't insta-bankrupting.

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suby
A lot of these are tied to lack of healthcare. We need a universal healthcare
system in America, I'm tired of arguing with people who claim that we can't do
what almost every (if not every) other western country has already done.

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rayiner
I’m a supporter of universal healthcare. But the fact that Germany or Denmark
can do it doesn’t mean we can. Copenhagen is building a fully automated circle
line subway beneath downtown for the same money it’s costing us to build a
shorter light rail line through the DC suburbs. Moving a bit further afield,
our schools are terrible despite our per-student spending being near the top
of the OECD. We already spend as much public money on healthcare as most
Western European countries do, without achieving universal coverage. Our non-
military government spending per capita is slightly higher than Canada’s, and
we get fewer services for it. Americans are uniquely bad at government
compared to western countries.

Look at it from the other side. If European governments were as inefficient at
providing public services as Americans are, would Europeans support mass
transit and universal healthcare? If it was going to cost $6 billion to build
a light rail line through the suburbs, mightn’t the Danes say: “fuck it we’ll
build a freeway?”

Concrete example on the healthcare front. In Europe, universal healthcare is
typically paid for with social insurance taxes primarily imposed on people
making under $70,000. If you look at the proposals for Medicare for All that
have been proposed by Democrats, you see two remarkable things:

1) Nobody proposes taxes to actually fund the expected cost;

2) Nobody proposed the level of middle class taxes (VAT and social insurance)
typically imposed in European countries to find universal healthcare. Sanders’
proposal comes the closest, but is half the level of say France’s.

There is an important political observation here: there is little support for
European-style healthcare in the US. What would happen if we had a straight
up/down vote on Germany’s healthcare system? Or France’s? Or the UK’s? The
support that exists in the US is for universal healthcare that is paid for by
billionaires and corporations rather than the middle class. That’s a system
that exists nowhere in Western Europe. It’s completely unprecedented.

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sd8f9iu
>But the fact that Germany or Denmark can do it doesn’t mean we can.

Where is the evidence of this? Healthcare is not the same as infrastructure.
Medicare and Medicaid do a better job controlling costs than private insurers:
[https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20190211/NEWS/19021...](https://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20190211/NEWS/190219996/medicare-
medicaid-contain-costs-better-than-private-insurers-study-says)

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tptacek
The entire second half of the comment you're responding to addresses this. You
don't have to agree, but you can't reasonably rebut the whole comment by
pretending he didn't address it.

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sd8f9iu
The second part of OP's comment deals with the funding sources for public
healthcare. I'm responding to the allegation that our government couldn't
provide it in a cost effective manner in the first place. Where in the second
half is this addressed?

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TazeTSchnitzel
The glass isn't 95% empty, it's 5% full!

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chrisseaton
I don’t get it - the media companies didn’t create these bad situations -
they’re reporting people trying to do the best they can with the hands they’re
dealt. What should they do? Criticise people trying to help because it could
be better elsewhere?

Home Depot employees can’t change national attitudes to healthcare but they
can build someone a walker, so they’re bad people?

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snek
Well if you read the article, they say that the media should take these
stories as opportunities to discuss pressing social issues instead of skating
around them. Reporting is about bringing cohesive context to information, and
these stories do the opposite.

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whatshisface
> _Reporting is about bringing cohesive context to information_

 _Policy discussion_ is about bringing cohesive context to information.
Reporting is about reporting information.

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ggggtez
Do you really think reporters just state facts and call it a day? How do they
know which facts are the important ones to say? Why not list the shoesize of
everyone they interview, along with the name of their dog? Obviously, I'm
making a point:

Facts tell a story. The reporters for these stories are choosing what facts
tell the narrative they think people want (triumph over adversity) without
mentioning the facts that they think people don't want (acknowledging that the
healthcare system in the US is broken for most Americans).

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whatshisface
There's a subtle difference between sorting based on priority and compiling
facts to suit a narrative. If you start with a narrative, you will fall prey
to things like confirmation bias. There's nothing wrong with prioritizing the
most important information, but it's very bad to say "today I am going to
prove that XYZ" before going around prioritizing all the facts that would make
XYZ seem real. It's a fine line between journalism and opinion pieces.

To get a better perspective of this, imagine a reporter that earnestly
believed something you disagreed with. You'd probably want them to stick to
the facts instead of tying every world event to their favorite policy.

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binarymax
Even worse is the first example is definitely an ad for home depot. It’s
radical consumerism masquerading as hope.

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inflatableDodo
> _" Millennials move from job to job in order to climb the ladder…. For baby
> boomers and other generations…loyalty and dedication to a single company or
> career drove, and still drives, much of their working lives."_

Can someone tell me where the companies are that will return such loyalty?
I've been looking and they don't seem to exist any more (if they ever really
did).

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whamlastxmas
Look for a company that provides a defined benefit pension plan. It's
basically impossible to find but really the only way an employer could
convince me they care about tenure

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liberte82
So government or public-private partnerships are your options

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stillbourne
This is one of the things I hate about the American Ninja Warrior. Look at all
the hardship and trials and tribulations this person has done to get here. Not
about they exercise mind you, but the circumstances of their shitty existence.
Rejoice that these mere mortals have the opportunity to run this obstacle
course that is a metaphor of their shitty little lives.

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melling
People seem to love human interest stories. The nightly news on the majors
usually ends with one.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-
interest_story](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-interest_story)

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Hnrobert42
The world is a pretty miserable place, and there is no shortage of coverage
(local nightly news, anyone?). I for one don’t mind a few pieces focused on an
uplifting part of any otherwise sad story.

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RickJWagner
Huh. I hadn't heard of Fair.org before.

I'm going to add them to my RSS reader for a while. If they realy are 'fair',
it should be a breath of fresh air.

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benj111
There was a comment on a good news story today basically suggesting there
should be a minimum percentage of good news stories.

I guess these are the types of stories we'd get!

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philwelch
Stories about families and communities coming together to help each other out
are “horrifying” because that’s supposed to be the exclusive concern of
government?

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konschubert
These people end up with solutions that are sub-optimal exposing them to more
suffering than would have been necessary in a civilized country.

The horrifying part is that the overton window in the US is so out of whack
that somehow people consider these stories uplifting.

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philwelch
I dunno, that Home Depot walker doesn’t look “sub-par” to me. And I speak from
personal experience with Actual Medical Equipment.

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Doxin
The horrifying part there is of course that the subject of that story doesn't
have access to sufficient medical care and equipment.

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wuliwong
This article doesn't present the case that this is something wide spread or
increasing in frequency. It just contains links to various articles but gives
the reader no idea of the relative numbers of this type of reporting versus
other types and whether or not this type of reporting is increasing in
frequency. This is a complete non-issue if these are the only 10 or so
articles in the last 3 years.

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GuB-42
No matter what created the horrible situation, getting out of it by
perseverance and cleverness is good.

Sure better health care or whatever could have prevented the situation, but
that's not the subject. We don't live in a perfect world, and these stories
tell you that even if you can't change the world, you can still solve your own
problems.

And if such articles are a problem than what about celebration of war heroes.
Do we need to forget their resolve in the face of adversity just because war
is essentially state sanctioned mass murder?

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kaitai
"...these stories tell you that even if you can't change the world, you can
still solve your own problems." I think part of the criticism is that this
statement is false in many cases.

The psychological benefit of such stories is that we can comfort ourselves by
telling others that if they didn't manage to cure their own leukemia and run a
marathon while supporting three children and a disabled spouse, they just
weren't creative and perseverant enough.

A similar criticism can legitimately be made of glorifying war heroes. It
makes it easier to pat ourselves on the back for sending them into a situation
in which they can prove their resolve by avoiding death for a while, and we
can ignore all the dumb schmucks who just got blown up right away -- they
simply didn't show much resolve, did they.

It's all sort of the converse of "the personal is political"...

