Worry, Worry

There is, I believe, a genre of news story that can be described as speculative nonfiction. In this particular case, National Public Radio rounds up a bunch of experts to basically guess at what the future is going to look like. The story feels like prognostication disaster porn, with its focus on a catastrophe that may or may not come to pass.

I would suspect that a more straightforward piece on why it's still useful to continue the precautionary measures that people have adopted to mitigate the SARS-CoV-2 would have still gotten the point across without appearing to indulge in fearmongering. But in a media environment where clicks are everything, being straightforward doesn't seem to cut it very often.