Are we taking the news for granted?

Ok you’ll need some background info here: my sister recently visited China and came back yesterday with mildly severe sleep deprivation and a backpack full of stories.

Ok now onto the topic. While we were talking about this and that we realised she had missed almost all the news. Like +90% of it! She’d heard about the floods, the doping debate in Russia, and a tiny bit about the election in America but only through an American Guy. She hadn’t heard about the Egypt Air plane crash, the missing Japanese boy, the storm in Australia, or the raid on the Tiger temple in Thailand. I asked her why that was, if she didn’t pay attention to the news or if there were no news, but she said “no, I watched news quite frequently cause they’re everywhere and even in English on the train or in cafes”. But apparently they didn’t broadcast anything ‘important’. She said to me it didn’t even cross her mind she may not be told everything because at home (aka in Germany) you can usually believe what you see.

The issue at hand is that if you always feel so well informed, you forget to question what you’re not seeing, and what you’re not being told.

And I think that is a really big problem. Even here in Europe, where we believe to be completely informed, some information is being withheld from public. Just remember that spying incident where it took some weeks for the info to leak or the incidents on New Year’s Eve in cologne, where journalists almost had to drag every piece of information out of someone.

I don’t think (and hope) that this is as big a problem in Europe, but I wrote this article because hearing from my sister’s (I’m tempted to say compulsory ignorance) — uninformed-ness made me think about this a lot.