Case in point the two National Guards that got shot and one died. If I shot two people it would not register nationally. I am a traveling nurse and don’t know why people treat them differentaly ? I mean they are signing up and taking a risk doing so. I got empathy for families and stuff but childeren get killed everyday, or a nurse gets AIDS from a needle poke. Why should their lives matter more than yours?
I think there are two general (human) media preferences at work: “if it bleeds, it ledes” superceded by which deaths are more extraordinary. So soldiers murdered in peacetime is noteworthy. They could’ve become accountants but chose a career where there is a real and high risk of death. Btw I fear it’s that death math that made medical professionals drop out of noteworthiness post-pandy, i.e. the threat is real but the risk has gone down again. I think children dying generally of tragic circumstances will be noteworthy. Nurses contracting AIDS or non-famous people dying of natural causes become less noteworthy. And I use noteworthy here as what they chose to cover in their newsrooms. They have financial interests to consider as well, which brings us back to “if it bleeds.”
The American filter generally erases many “mundane” gun deaths from visibility. Either people are so numb it doesn’t register as the tragedy that it is or it doesn’t get covered. There are plenty of places on earth where a single gunshot fired in anger that would make headlines.
There is a worldwide blindness to traffic deaths. We have just accepted that this is how many people die. So if something more interesting happens elsewhere, the t-boned accountant on the way to Walmart just gets dropped.
So there are a number of factors that influence what makes the news or not. The list goes on.
I would also say that media coverage is not prescriptive for who you should feel empathy for. We cannot all feel all the tragedies on this planet at once. We’d go mad. You pick and choose as a defense mechanism. So if you don’t feel that much empathy for these national guardsmen, I kind of get it. If you don’t like how much media coverage it’s getting, I can definitely understand that. The problem is just that when you say this out loud you open yourself up to criticism, like: you don’t feel for the people who died while sworn to defend your freedom! What about children and nurses? That’s just whataboutism! Etc. So I would suggest you follow your own heart and change your media consumption when it bothers you. Or you’ll end up in a culture war debate about whose lives matter more.