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  • No one outside of here has any interest in the brutality of this place.

    Well, I'm a counter-example, and there are many others. I've been following it, sometimes very closely, since about 1990 and have many Irish/Northern Irish friends with whom I talk about it (too little during the pandemic, admittedly). Sure, many incidents like the ones you mention don't make the news in the UK, but it's definitely generally the case with murders, crashes, and other horrible events that very few become famous cases that are reported non-locally. I mean, where one cause of murders over in NI is sectarianism, in London it can be postcode wars or drug wars, and you don't even hear about all of those murders if you live in London, unless you pay special attention.

    I don't think it's just a problem with people being 'bored' with it. It's also a problem with the idea of 'newsworthiness' generally--that journalists want to tell a story, and if it's the same bloody story again on which there's no original angle, papers probably won't take it. It definitely contributes to important issues being forgotten. I think journalism should function differently, i.e. not push some issues massively and over-report on them, blotting out most other things, but there's only so much attention for so many things.

    Also in addition to those points, I think there is certainly still an active interest on the part of some sections of the UK media in not reporting on all of it, for various reasons.

  • Are you aware of a crash here yesterday where a young couple died (21 and 25) and left three children without parents?

    I appreciate that you take a personal interest but the media don’t.

  • In fairness, your example is a regional news issue. Car crashes aren’t always reported in national news sections? Take RTÉ and their inconsistent criteria for reporting similar. As with all journalism, there are priorities to be reported in a limited time. I still think you’re correct re the stories relating to violence though.

  • I wasn't before you pointed it out, no. As Murakami says, horrible though it is, this is probably not a story that will make it beyond regional news. I follow Irish/NI news more generally and don't particularly make a point of following crashes outside of London (although I'm often interested in crashes in other larger cities), and crashes in NI I only really see when someone starts a thread about them in 'Rider Down'. How crashes happen is really the same everywhere, sadly, and Irish news interests me more for what is specific to them.

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