The Show Must Go On

It's best not to think of the mainstream media as providing any form of balanced information. It's more a show designed to capture the fragile attention span of the mindless masses and subject them to whatever propaganda campaign is being promoted at the time. Figure 1 shows the opening page of the BBC's website for May 6th 2021:

Figure 1

There is a photo in the centre of the page showing a woman being subjected to the nasal swab, with everybody else dutifully masked. Propaganda point being to remind us to keep our masks on and that testing is essential in determining who is infected. On the right, a very focused health care professional is drawing vaccine from a vial into a syringe for administration to a patient. Propaganda point being to remind us that getting vaccinated is the only way to contain the spread of the virus. The phrase "Covid surge" emphasises that the virus is not just spreading, it is surging. The term "double mutant" indicates that the virus is not standing still, it is mutating and it will be a battle to contain these mutant varieties.

The BBC could have chosen any number of stories for its opening page but it chose the surge of double mutant strains of Covid in India. It wants this "news" to be the first to catch the attention of regular and random visitors. Even if the visitor then clicks on the sports section of the site, the takeaway is that COVID is out of control in India, it has mutated and things could get like that where you are if you don't get tested and have the vaccine as soon as its available. Other countries are using India as an example of what can go wrong if citizens don't take the virus seriously. This is not news, its theatre.

The Urban Dictionary puts it succinctly in this definition of fear porn:

There are quite a few choice definitions to be found in this dictionary:

A few hours after starting this post, India is still "front page" news with a new centre photo but the vaccine man is still there on the right. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

It's still panic stations of course as international aid is apparently not arriving quickly enough. Here is a link to a video that examines the media hype surrounding Covid in India (round about the 12:20 to 21:20 minute mark of a 32 minute video. The creators of the video have a channel on Odysee that I've subscribed to. See Figure 3. I've only watched this one video so far.

Figure 3