patrick.net

In a way, the science mags are running into the same problem media had back during covid, when every new, more terrifying variant, arriving like clockwork every eight-point-three minutes, stretched the journalistic thesaurus to the breaking point. Alarming, dire, dangerous, dreadful, fearsome, formidable, horrifying, and so on until they reached the end of the alphabet: worrisome.

Then they went back to the beginning and started over, patiently and methodically working their way back through the letters, but Newsweek prematurely jumped the queue and ejected the “Doomsday variant.” It was all downhill from there, and reporters limply accepted they’d shot their wad and became a spent force.

This phenomenon is only ‘new’ in the sense that, as we’ve become increasingly mentally vaccinated to media alarmism through a long-term desensitization process, they’ve steadily increased the frightfulness-volume setting to a deafening ’11.’

I fondly recall how, back in the halcyon 90’s, enjoying the post-Soviet peace dividend, media would run much simpler doomsday stories like “Formica: The Silent Killer.” Or my personal, all-time favorite, even beyond covid (to which I’ve now devoted a substantial chunk of my career), the Venn-diagram convergence of about six attention-grabbing media gambits: “Is Your Bra Killing You?”