@anonymous @TheMadPirate @deadheat @pomstan

> I think the civilian casualties are worth addressing every now and again.

Well, sure, it's stuff worth thinking/talking about, just not stuff worth arguing about on the internet, you know what I mean? But why these civilian casualties? There are civilian casualties all over the earth on a regular basis. I saw some chart, I forget, but most years, when the UN passes a resolution that names specific countries, 75% of the time at least one of those countries is "Israel" or "Palestine". There's a severely disproportionate amount of attention drawn to this one conflict: why? (I mean, the obvious reason is that it started with the Cold War, it was kind of a focal point.)

One interesting conclusion from the McCombs/Shaw paper was that, although mass media is bad at directly influencing people's opinions on any topic, it does have a very strong effect on *which* topics people discuss, and thus which opinions they backfill when asked by other people.

So what's going on in the Levant is another bag of upturned rabbits that the press is chasing around. Which thing are you not paying attention to if you look at that?

> the reeeeeeing from Israeli

Why not the REEEEEEing from Hutus or Tutsis? This is what I'm getting at: you care about these groups, one of these is funny and one is not.
McCombsShaw1972--agenda_setting.pdf