The love of Fear

No media has covered this, but R.I.P to all the people that lost their lives in Lebanon yesterday from Isis attacks pic.twitter.com/mZXUEcxDmR

— Jackjonestv (@jackjonestv) November 14, 2015

 So I was made aware of this on Twitter today... what a horrible image and message. This was posted the day after the Paris attacks and is a VERY important thought for all of us. Places like Lebanon live in a constant level of death and destruction that we in American will never fully appreciate. I don't know who Jack Jones really is. From that I take he is a "celebrity" in the UK. He has more than 82,000 followers has 17,000 likes and tweets regularly. This particular Tweet was re-tweeted 57,000 times! WOW, that is a pretty good reach into our crazy world of social media.

Again, I feel that this is a very important message for all of us and something that the media doesn't cover because we are busy talking about what one of the Kardashians wore or what is the correct pronouns we should use for people now a days. Here lies the rub... the pictures has nothing to do with the attacks in Beirut on November 12, 2015. The picture is from 2006 and is of the shelling that Israel did after a rocket was fired from Lebanon into their country.

Here is another issue from his tweet... if you google "Lebanon attacks November 2015" there are news stories about this from the NY Times, LA Times, Slate, Rolling Stone, CNN, The Washington Post, The Daily Star UK and the list goes on and on. SO media DID cover it.

So why did it seem that there was no coverage? Simply it was "Clicks and Likes". The lack of Clicks and Likes on digital media runs what we see on TV and on our social media feeds. I don't know what the real big news stories were that day, but I did find that a story on ABC News about Donald Trump asking the voters of Delaware if "the really believed Ben Carson's crap" about his past got almost twice as many Shares than this story about suicide bombers that killed people in Beirut.

I don't know what this says about us, the media or how we look at what is "news". I do it too! For some reason when I pull up the my daily review of the HuffPo, my eyes always move to the right columns more than the center columns or the OpEds. My rant started that when I thought that "who is this guy to pull this kind of crap?" but turned quickly in my head to really focus more on what is important to me and us than the fluff that is floating out there on-line. Also I am going to research the stories that seem fantastic to me. This story is important to us. With just a few clicks we find out that the attacks that were in Paris happen all the time, all over the world and they ARE covered, it's just up to us to find it. It's up to us to talk about it. CNN, ABC, FOX and the rest are going to talk about it if it gets them more LIKES, SHARES and get them more money from sponsors and advertisers. When we talk about it on social media, blogs, podcasts or, heaven forbid, FACE to FACE, it costs us nothing and the messages get out!

This blog and our soon to be podcast was born out of this need for us to talk. Talk about anything, everything and do it all day long. We have this amazing First Amendment right to say what we want. I am evoking mine, right now to say... THANK YOU JACK JONES for posting this tweet in a kinda douchbaggy way.