I base these posts on Fandango’s Who Won the Week posts, and I use the opportunity just to look at my own newsfeeds.

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There has been an interesting story in the UK this week. It surrounds a twelve-year-old boy, Archie Battersby. He was found unconscious for no apparent reason back in April. At the time he was rushed to hospital and put onto Life Support.

He never regained consciousness.

What has happened to Archie seems tragic, but that’s not the focus of my post.

You see, at some point, the hospital said, “there’s no brain activity”, and wanted to turn off life support. Archie’s mother disagreed. An impossible situation.

It went to the courts. It reached the media. Britain knew all about little Archie. Last week, it came to a head as the mother exhausted all of her legal options. In fact, that story was headline news on Thursday, dominating every broadcast.

The press really cared about Archie, right?

Wrong.

Doctors were due to turn off life support on Friday morning. So I had a look at the news channels Friday. Nothing. No follow-up, nothing. Bear in mind, this was headline news the day before.

I looked Saturday. Same result. Nothing.

This morning (Sunday) I found a tiny article. I had to go hunting for it.

My point here is… don’t think the media ever cares. Well, it’s clear they cared about the legal battle, because they made it front-page news, but they didn’t give a monkey’s about the boy’s life, which you might reasonably argue is more important.

There’s an air of mercenary about this. They’ll report something just as long as it attracts views. It’s all about clickbait. After that they will lose interest. A story might still be live, but if the editor has decided that it is no longer titillating enough, they’ll look for fresh fodder to throw at you instead. Rest assured that whatever you see on the news tonight, whichever outlets you take on board, an editor will have already decided what you will see, and as importantly, what will go unseen. An editor will already be influencing your view of the world before the hack even utters a word.

Just be aware of that – you’ll never get a full-circle view of the world from a single source.

But to bring my own story full-circle, poor Archie died midday yesterday.