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Notes -
This post was spurred by the latest episode of the Israel and Palestine Show and me accessing the frontpage of my national brodacaster and seeing only one story on the right hand that directly concerned the lives of people living in this country.
The News Problem
It occurs to me that much of the connected world is gripped by "News Problems". A "News Problem" is a problem that ceases to affect you the moment you turn off the news. To determine whether something is a news problem or not, ask yourself this question: if I was suddenly made to forget the information I had just watched or read about, would my life be any different?
An obvious example of something that is not a News Problem would be stories about inflation: inflation trickles all the way down to the consumer. It is made immediately obvious when the price of your favourite foods goes up, or when your money gets you less petrol than it used to at the pump. The topics involved in the story are those that directly affect the material world around you. To go back further, during the terrible time when a large chunk of the world was denied Freedom of Association over a virus with a 99%> chance of survival, the information coming out of the news outlets was of varying utility. For some people, Covid: The Virus was a just News Problem but for almost everyone, the actions taken by the State to control the virus were not News Problems.
In regards to story I initially mentioned, whether the debate starts begins on who you are: if you have family or friends in the region, or if they have been affected by the recent attacks, then this is very much not a news problem. If you are Jewish and living in a city with a large Muslim population (or a population of people who care very strongly about the issue despite neither being Muslim nor Jewish), you may or may be directly affected by the events as they occur in the region, but you may certainly care about how that population responds to you, particularly if you present as being Jewish.
So, can you ignore news problems? The answer, to my eternal chargin, is no. Even if the story has no material affect on my life, I am still surrounded by people who care about it, and in turn expect me to care about it. Should the conversation emerge at my place of work (so far it hasn't, and for that I am extremely grateful), I may be asked for my opinion, and my genuine opinion would piss off everyone in the room. During the summer of 2020, depending upon your position in society, you might have faced social repercussions if you didn't agree with the rhetoric at the time. This could have been something as simple as nodding along to what was being said, or, if you were in a position of power, expected to divert your resources, energy and face to something you strongly disagreed with.
Will there be an end to the News Problem? The obvious cure is to take the grillpill, which in this sense means turning off your device and going outside, but this only works if everyone takes the grillpill. Had you taken the grillpill in a city, you might have bumped into protests about the dispute.
Seconding /u/Jiro below. Just because something currently has no direct material impact on your life doesn't mean it never will, and forewarned is forearmed. It seems the height of intellectual arrogance to think you can reliably predict which events currently in the news will never have any direct impact on your life in the future - The Black Swan spent 400 pages warning against the folly of doing so. It's doubly arrogant when we live in an extremely interconnected globalised economy: a person getting sick with an infectious disease in Wuhan might not have had much impact on the average European's life in the 14th century, but the same cannot be said in the 21st.
Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me. Just because we don't have a 100% cast-iron lock on future prescience doesn't mean we can't make reasonable predictions. Adopting your attitude would make investing impossible, for example: the commodity might go down instead of up, just as the news might prove relevant rather than a nothingburger.
But being neither Muslim nor Jewish and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which shenannegains in the holy land could ever become relevant to me.
And anyway, OP's complaint seemed not so much "this is irrelevant" as "this is pushing actually relevant stuff off the front page of the BBC", which I feel is a stronger argument. To almost everyone in Britain, this coverage is essentially bread and circuses: a bunch of flashy explosions which has the convenient by-product of distracting them from their real, non-News-Problems with fake (as in, fake relevance) News Problems.
In a globalized world, these shenanigans impact Muslims and Jews living in my country. Muslims in particular are feeling unfairly treated, which can cause attacks to happen against Jews or non-Jews.
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You could get several thousand refugees settled in your neck of the woods.
This was happening in various places around the UK before recent developments. At best, this only accelerates something that already existed. The source ultimately did not matter until all the stars align and the knock on effects reached your doorstep.
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"But being neither Austrian nor Bosnian, and having only one friend who's either, I struggle to think of a plausible conduit by which a political assassination in the Balkans could ever become relevant to me."
I mean, really? Israel is a nuclear power, backed by the biggest superpower in the world. Hamas is backed, formally or tacitly, by a host of Middle Eastern nations, at least one of which (Iran)
is a nuclear powerhas an active nuclear program. The Palestinian conflict has been threatening to spill over and become something much graver than a territorial squabble for decades.Even without literal WW3 breaking out, there are lots of ways the conflict could directly impact on you, personally, even without you being Jewish or Muslim. One example off the top of my head: a full-scale boycott of Israeli companies modelled on that enacted upon apartheid-era South Africa (as advocated for by Ilhan Omar, among many others) would have all kinds of unforeseen and potentially destabilizing effects upon the global economy.
Is the Palestinian conflict less relevant to the average Briton than, say, Rishi Sunak's economic policies? Of course. But I'd argue it's more relevant (or at least potentially relevant) than what Meghan Markle had for breakfast, or "underrepresentation of BAME people in BBC radio dramas", or Trump's dirty laundry - so it seems odd to use this as an example of the general trend of "media pushing non-stories to distract the hoi polloi".
I think there's a world of difference between making an educated prediction that [story] is unlikely to have any direct impact on your life, and explicitly stating that it never will. OP sounded closer in tone to the latter, at least as far as my reading went.
I don't think Iran is known to be a nuclear power, at least as I understand the phrase (possessing nuclear weaponry).
Upon further investigation you are correct, but the country does have an active nuclear weapons program and are working towards the goal of having nuclear weapons at their disposal. Or perhaps it might be accurate to say that any nuclear weapons Iran might possess are not a matter of public record as in the case of the US, Russia etc.
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As with Isreal, it's not officially acknowledged but it is essentially an open secret.
It's well known that Iran wants to be a nuclear power but I've never seen even one bit of credible speculation that Iran would actually have a working nuclear weapon.
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Perhaps I’m playing devil’s advocate, but the assassination’s significance was immediately noticed.
The Washington Post, 14 July, 1914.
Sure, but imagine you pulled a list of the names of the British soldiers who died in the battle of the Somme. Do you think that if you went back in time to January 1914 and asked them for their thoughts on Archduke Ferdinand, the majority of them would have the slightest idea who you were talking about? I'm quite confident the default response would be something to the effect of "never heard of him, nothing to do with me". Maybe some of them would have been vaguely aware of who he was in the same way that I know the leader of France is named Emmanuel Macron, but surely the majority would never be able to foresee a future in which Ferdinand's death directly leads to their own.
I'm not saying that anyone living in the UK is likely to die as a direct result of the conflict in Palestine escalating. I'm simply trying to illustrate that you never actually know which world events will eventually end up affecting you, and it isn't hard to end up with egg on your face. And if I was trying to pick an example of a global issue which has a negligibly small chance of affecting me personally, the conflict in Palestine wouldn't be at the top of my list.
Frank Ferdinand was de jure commander in chief of the Austrian military(as was at that point the norm for Austrian crown princes) and asking a British soldier ‘how does the top Austrian field marshal’s death possibly relate to your own’ would not seem terribly implausible even if the chain of causes would probably be wrong.
Sure, but lots of soldiers who died in the Somme weren't soldiers in January 1914 - a million men enlisted between August 1914 and January 1915, and the UK introduced conscription in 1916.
‘How does an Austrian field marshal’s death lead to yours’ has a pretty obvious answer for a British man in early 1914, though- I go into the army during a war.
Try asking young American men how a high ranking Russian/Chinese/Iranian military officer’s death could be connected to theirs. Most could point to an at least plausible chain of causality, even if they’re not that geopolitically aware.
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