Chilean Miners: Media only does human interest, cannot handle reason

It is great that the 31 Chilean miners have been rescued. The media attention of the whole world has been concentrated on this human story, of miners being brought back from the dead.

This obsessive media spotlight on one human story should also cause us to wonder about the choices of what journalists regard as a story. Human interest is what drives the media. Everyone can identify with the families and friends of men who are alive but trapped, at risk of starving to death, but are successfully rescued.

The attention on the lives of these 31 men contrasts with the almost complete ignoral given to the lives of thousands of children, women and men who are put at risk every day by military action, and are immiserated by oppressive, dictatorial governments. Of course, if it is politically expedient, we will be treated to exquisite detail of lives ruined by the actions of a dictator who the Government has decided is ripe for invasion. Even if the stories are fantasy.

So we have a massive disconnect in proportionality. Journalists love a good human interest story, but they have almost no interest whatsoever in drawing attention to problems which in numerical terms totally overshadow the stories that they like, let alone the solutions to those problems.

I wrote a book in 1996 which showed that about 20% of NHS clinical activity is devoted to trying to treat problems associated with unemployment, poverty, bad housing and pollution. A BBC editor friend informed me sadly that there was no chance of getting this discussed on air. He said "If you could come up with one child who was hideously deformed as a result of his father being unemployed, you would have a story. But 20% of the NHS budget? That's not a story".

Basically, the mainstream media cannot handle reason. It can only handle sound bites and short human interest narratives. Get used to it. And the way to get used to it is to use the internet to pull the carpet from under the media.