Disaster entertainment

Here’s an odd one from Twitter.

To save you the click, it’s someone posting a picture in an airport, off to a summer beach holiday, with a glass of wine, and reading one of the latest memoir, journalism-ish books to come out about the war in Ukraine. Retweeted by the author, no less.

It’s irreverent. Yes, I’ve read serious books on summer vacation, but the atmosphere of tweeting about a beach read of an ongoing war is just baffling.

A theme I keep coming back to is that the news shouldn’t be entertainment. This tendency, which predates social media, drives a lot of the problems with modern politics and society.

We’ve lost gravitas. Everything has become part of the disposable entertainment cycle.

Related note: Disaster journalism then and now