297
Polar bear dies from bird flu as H5N1 spreads across globe
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
297 points (98.1% liked)
News
23397 readers
3618 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Pretty sure that's the same bear. Utqiagvik is the largest city in North Slope and one of just a few cities in the Arctic. The virus was detected 3 weeks ago but we don't know when it was reported on that USDA site. That still makes the detection in polar bears and in the Arctic very recent. That information was probably only publicly available more recently than 3 weeks ago.
The earliest reporting I could find was 3 days ago in Alaskan press and earlier today in nonlocal reporting.
I still say it's legit news, and not click bait. Appreciate the civil discussion though!
I probably was too brief - I did not intend to suggest that it was "fake news" or anything, just that the novelty was of an extremely narrow and specific kind. In looking around the internet at some journalism lingo, "churnalism" comes somewhat close to what I meant. Basically we have this 24/7 news cycle by for-profit companies that in an effort to maximize the stock dividends of their investors must spit out new content every minute of every hour of every day, regardless of how "important" that news is. Which isn't to say that H5N1 being deadly is not news-worthy! Though I am suggesting that all these articles on this precise subject matter (of this single polar bear having died from it) seem to have borrowed from the importance of being more deadly world-wide, in order to sell their stories about this singular individual bear.
Next we could have an article on the second polar bear to have died from it, or the third, or perhaps from the first female polar bear (or male, whichever is the opposite of the earlier one), or the first non-Alaskan polar bear to die from it etc. And while each new one can technically be "correct" and "novel", I would argue that at some point it is no longer "news-worthy". Yet apparently in this case I would be wrong, b/c some people seem very interested in this new fact!:-P
Come to think of it, it probably is b/c polar bears are cute. So rather than "clickbait", I probably should have said that it is "sensationalist news", meant more to shock and awe and "entertain" (even if in the negative sense) than to inform.
And thank you in return for the same:-).