Stories contain horrific details, such as a mother being forced to eat the carved out eye of her baby boy (to which she passed out)
No! No! No! I nearly sicked up my pizza when I read that. I am used to attributing acts like that to psycho serial killers. Just one individual in a whole community. Not a whole community.
Mass media seems to just report for the masses. There are a few individual journalists who literally risk life and limb to report real events. They rarely get much recognition. Yalda Hakim is one I can think of off the top of my head. You have to look for stuff like that and most people don't.
I went through a 'mad phase' after 9/11. I put my TV in the skip and didn't have one for five years. I was bored shitless by sitcoms and soaps and was just disgusted at what i saw on the news. I went to work everyday but my spare time was spent alone with my dogs. I really didn't want to engage with the human race at all and was completely blind to what was going on in the news. I obviously 'got over' it and it seems extreme now but i needed to zone out like that. The evil that people do to each other is something i can't fathom. Ignorance is bliss as they say.
You are absolutely right about that, I often find myself reading about events that I barely even heard about - only to find out that the event is, on top of that, thoroughly documented! For example the ethnic cleansing in Sri-Lanka, not to mention the extremely harsh military crackdown now recently.
I was quite surprised at the surreal horror of it, how well documented it was, and how little I had heard about it, through the usual channels.
Like you say, it is up to the individuals to find out about these things, which is unfortunate :I
(part of the reason I made the Yugo-thread, that nobody has commented on >:'I even there, an event so close to home, it was mostly superficial details that came in the news, most famously the NATO bombing, and the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. While the details that create a complete picture are mostly left out. People are left ignorant as to why these things keep happening!)