I just participated in my first strike last Spring! First one ever for my union. We got a new contract not long afterward so it turned out to be worth all the commentary from uninformed idiots claiming we educators are lazy and overpaid. (We’d actually been working for years under “temporary” cuts that put our salaries below what they had been in 2007.)
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Misread as Indiana, thought it sounded legit.
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We didn’t notice because we didn’t have anything to notice. I spent a good portion of my day that day with CNN in the background. So… the point of the headline is that I’m not omniscient? Because if the point of the article is that American news networks suck, the the headline is mismatched.
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Americans sometimes miss things that happen overseas.
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On the contrary, that’s exactly what it means.
I can’t say I’m well-traveled, but there’s no media quite like American media when it comes to navel-gazing. The US thinks it’s the greatest country in the world in part because it almost never hears anything about any other country unless the military is bombing it, a nuclear power is saber-rattling, or an English-speaking royal is extending their family.
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Heck, If that strike happened here the major networks still wouldn’t cover it. Remember all of the protests against the gulf war and Bernie Sanders’ huge rallies?
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The kind of hyperbolizing that transforms ‘virtually no media coverage’ into ‘no one in the US noticed’ is what gets us clickbait titles. “Few” isn’t the same as “no one.”
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Unionized and striking workers don’t get covered here in the states (even when it happens here) 'cause it doesn’t jive with America’s narrative of bootstraps and all that.
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Protesters of all stripes don’t get covered because someone is always protesting something. My grandfather’s union used to go on strike annually. Didn’t raise many eyebrows then either. It would be the sort of run-of-the-mill, not entertaining, not frightening news that you put on page B8.
That all is beside the point in this case, because these people are not in the U.S., and thus no one in the U.S. would care one way or another.
They are covered some but mostly as a warning of ‘hey there’s some travel inconveniences because union XYZ that staffs the metro/bus/taxi system’ the impact is mostly local so the coverage is pretty local as well. It’s really of very little concern to the average person here in the US if a group in India strikes.
Well the hyperbole is obviously baked in the headline before you even click on it when you consider the author is based in America. Or did you really think you were going to read about how Doctorow ran a survey on 300 million people over the long weekend asking if they knew about the strike? Because if you did, I have this land in Florida you might be interested in…
Does anyone know what the state owned companies Modi proposed selling off are? This and a couple of other articles I found mention it, but don’t go into details. I’m especially wondering if they’re natural resources things, or something else.
Yes, that’s what clickbait is.
No… it isn’t. There’s a subtle difference.
Yes, clickbait makes hyperbolic statements in order to generate clicks, but the hyperbole is a misrepresentation of the facts that don’t become clear until you read the article.
This headline is clearly hyperbolic before you read the article, and therefore is not baiting clicks unless you completely miss the exaggeration. But if that’s the case, well… just never read the Onion if you want to maintain your sanity.
You mean like this one… This is a judgment call in which we disagree, and it’s pointless to debate really. Good day.
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I guess Gil Scott-Heron was right about the US at least.
not all of us are bads.
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American media have studiously ignored India for years…
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