Did You Hear About

There was a story on the NPR website today about a business I've never heard of in a town in Maine that I've never heard of. Someone there put up a sign disparaging Juneteenth, and the Internet became involved. Public relations departments swung into action, relationships were severed and local people expressed their surprise and disappointment that there was actually someone unenlightened in their town.

This is national news, why? I get that the Internet isn't a particularly constrained resource, especially not for an outlet like National Public Radio, but the whole thing strikes me as trivial. It's little more than a "bah, humbug!" applied to a different holiday. It's the sort of thing that people will point to when they decry racism as an active mindset in the United States, but anyone who lives somewhere with more than a dozen other people in the immediate vicinity could find an example much closer to home.

But outrage drives clicks. And what good is a news outlet without an audience? To the degree that the NPR audience is one that rewards putting trivial displays of pettiness on the front page, then that's what NPR will do. People like me still drop in from time to time looking to keep up with what's going on in the world, and so the numbers stay good, and NPR sees no reason to change. But it's occurred to me, and not for the first time, that I should change. Rather than spend my time digging through bits of outrage mining looking for something actually useful, I should go where the useful information is. This will, of course require that I subscribe to something, but since spending attention alone hasn't worked, maybe putting money on the table will be more productive.