Motivation

Suppose, for the moment, that you're a loser who dreams of being Somebody - of being remembered forever.

Now take a look at who's remembered.  For example: which name is more familiar, Norman Borlaug or Lee Harvey Oswald?

Yeah, yeah: not a fair comparison.  Oswald did something bold and newsworthy, i.e., killed a high-profile politician.  All Borlaug ever did was spend decades working to improve agricultural methods and crop breeds, and maybe he saved the lives of a billion people*.

So we see that, once the Press had gotten established and the latest shocking news would be all over the world in mere days, the easy path to notoriety was to bump off some random archduke** or famous musician, and journalism would do the rest.

But, somewhere along the line - was it the attacks on Gerald Ford and the Bishop of Rome? - the Important People made themselves much harder to get at, what with armored vehicles and armed guards and so on.

And so it came to pass, many years since, that one notoriety-seeking loser hit upon an innovation: rather than try to get at a well-protected Important Person, he'd commit a grand atrocity upon helpless and unprotected children, and within hours his name (which I shall not repeat) was a household word, worldwide.

Others have repeated that act over the years since, with variations.  Some have been more successful than others; those who stray too far from the story template receive little attention.  (Wasn't there a guy a few years back who murdered a bunch of children by driving his car into the group at high speed?  Yeah: big in the local news for a day or so, a brief mention on the national news, and soon forgotten.)

And, every time an atrocity that fits the template is perpetrated, the talking heads are on it 24/7, giving the public every last detail (even if most of the details later turn out to be completely wrong), and reinforcing the template.

So back to our starting supposition.  If you're a nobody, and wish to become an instant Somebody, is the path not clear?  Has cable news not told you what you must do, and how?

I mean, hey, if you spent a few decades slaving away in a genetics lab and developed a better way to feed the masses, you'd probably just be demonized anyway.  (Frankenfoods!  Enabling population growth!  Corporate profits!***)  Certainly you wouldn't get a lot of news coverage; any coverage there was would be of your detractors.

What's the lesson here?

* Poor people.  Most of them with dark skin.  Hardly newsworthy.

** Though hardly anyone remembers ol' Gavrilo's name; it was kinda swept from the headlines by subsequent events.

*** Worse still, you might develop some new high-yield strain with improved tolerance for climate variation, thereby undermining the climate-change agenda.