One hand distracts, while the other does the work, right? Perhaps. Lines of thought that run roughly, 'X is just a distraction from Y', are interesting.
The person making the claim presumably has followed both X and Y without losing focus, without which it would be harder to convincingly dismiss X.
Y is often a complex series of roughly related items, which itself presumes one can keep track of multiple threads without being distracted.
And, while this is perhaps a fair criticism of cable news (which does tend to obsess over one story per 'cycle'), actual newspapers, news-sites, and TV and radio programs typically cover more than one story in any given iteration.
Yet this odd meme persists. Every day, I see different people saying this, that, or the other thing is merely a distraction from some set of other stuff. Pretty regularly, one person's distraction is another person's story-They-are-trying-to-distract-You-from. If we're not all magicians, fooling eachother with elaborate gestures, then we have become that guy who sits in the crowd during the show claiming, "I know how that's done."
The person making the claim presumably has followed both X and Y without losing focus, without which it would be harder to convincingly dismiss X.
Y is often a complex series of roughly related items, which itself presumes one can keep track of multiple threads without being distracted.
And, while this is perhaps a fair criticism of cable news (which does tend to obsess over one story per 'cycle'), actual newspapers, news-sites, and TV and radio programs typically cover more than one story in any given iteration.
Yet this odd meme persists. Every day, I see different people saying this, that, or the other thing is merely a distraction from some set of other stuff. Pretty regularly, one person's distraction is another person's story-They-are-trying-to-distract-You-from. If we're not all magicians, fooling eachother with elaborate gestures, then we have become that guy who sits in the crowd during the show claiming, "I know how that's done."
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