• A lesson in the history of journalism •
[2 MIN READ]
One week’s Submarine Route run was prompted only in part by a desire to shake up the S5K Route run which has become the Growlers Group Run SOP (standard operating procedure). The other degree of appeal was the opportunity for a newbie to see the house featured in the Event That Shall Not Be Named (Nod to J. K. Rowling about V*** in her Harry Potter series.)
I have my own reasons for avoiding much ado. As someone quite attuned to grief ever since my father died (2011), making fun of anyone else’s grief (the survivor)—even in an event as astonishing and out-of-place-in-Abington as this one—feels disrespectful.
The continuing morbid interest prompted me to do an online web search: ‘attraction of lurid news’. I realize those aren’t the words the average person would use for such a search, but I am an academic librarian by profession; so there you go. Conditioned as I am to use words I believe are contextually meaningful, I did the search and found exactly the result I was seeking as hit #3 out of the first 10 results with the keywords in this context: “Yellow journalism, the use of lurid features and sensationalized news in newspaper publishing to attract readers and increase circulation” (Britannica).
I learned of the phrase in high school Social Studies class and hadn’t thought much about it since, but the contextual language was right on. The explanation seemed compelling. For my purposes, the connection to contemporary media behavior was à propos: “In other media, most notably television and the Internet, many of the sensationalist practices of yellow journalism became more commonplace.”
There you go: We are victims of our own history. We feel compelled to pay attention to the sensationalization of events because we are victims of historical media practice. I rise above the fray and do what I can to restore sanity. (Clearly, I’m not so above-the-fray that I won’t still keep writing about the event purely for the purpose of increasing circulation to this illustrious Growler Group Run publication.)
None of this is to say that that those who click on headlines or clickbait or who insist on doing the Submarine Route for voyeuristic reasons are their own victims of media culture and are, therefore, unthinking, unsympathetic boors… Oh, wait.
-CtCloser (Calvinthe), “Negative split or positive splat” #dothedue
FINE PRINT
¶Text and photos (unless otherwise stated): Calvin Wang (Wäng), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. ¶Cross-posted: (1) Facebook JRC Growlers Group Run (2023’08’02’W Run Message), (2) GGR email list, (3) Cerebruns by CtCloser. ¶This website posting: Cerebrun only with added caption.
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