DEATH LINKED TO!
What happened to the crisis back in the 1980s, around youngsters watching images of extreme violence? Thirty to forty years later, the next generation is still watching and perhaps watching even more violent images and violent youth crime has fallen. The social scientists could find no causative link and, bored, the media gaze turned away.
What about the dangerous dogs that were causing such damage? Well, it was a statistically less significant phenomenon that you might have thought given the media frenzy and once more the media gaze has turned away. Likewise, with the images of skinny models apparently causing eating disorders, the researchers found no direct connection and the media gaze, again turned away, looking for stimulation and titillation.
Children are still watching horrific images of violence, dogs are still biting and eating disorders are still with us. All that has changed is the reporting and that in turn has changed what many members of the public think about and what they worry about. Out of millions of stories they could have told, they, for a time, chose a few reports of violent acts by children and adolescents and made an easy connection between those and the popularity of video nasties. In so doing they chose not to tell many other stories which, had they been told, might have constructed a different reality. As audience interest began to dip, they looked around for new titillation. They did the same with the dogs and ultra-thin models until these too lost their appeal.
In Scotland, in the last few months, hospitals have suddenly become hot-beds of infection and these infections have been linked to patient deaths. Though none have been shown to have been killed by the infections just as none were shown to have been killed by fashion magazines, the stories are told in melodramatic, simplistic terms implying that they were.
You can tell that this is fake news because they were telling no such stories in such a frenzy, before, when infection rates were objectively higher, and because the English media are not telling the same story despite evidence of even greater general problems there.
What is different here, is that the Great Scottish Hospital Health Crisis is driven by a political agenda and not just by the desire to attract an audience.
