Why are some political causes more popular than others?

[backagainwithcoffee]

I was at a friend's last night and watched Beyond Utopia - brand new documentary about a pastor who is smuggling people out of North Korea. Some of the survivors told the true story about NL...average household had no running water or sanitation. Households have to shovel their own sewage into sacks and take it to a depository. There's very little food and families and children are often starving while at the same time it's a legal requirement to hang pictures of the Jung-un family on your 'best wall'. Officials do random patrols of houses and if your pictures are found to have dust, you can be imprisoned.

Was honestly one of the most shocking but heroic short films I've ever seen as this pastor got a family out to the South (including a 80 year old granny). There had been a bit of publicity (which is how I heard about it) but afterwards looked on socials fully expecting to see a hashtag or people losing their minds (in a good way!) at this pure evil but there was very little.

Got me wondering why it is that some 'causes' seem more 'popular' to the public than others? The world rallied behind Ukraine and now Gaza and it's everywhere, marches, flags, collections etc but what's happening in NK is (imo) the worst kind of evil but not many people seem interested.

This isn't meant to be goady by the way (I am NC) but genuinely wondering why some causes capture the public attention and others don't?

Popular disasters. Whatever news publish.
Thoughts and prayers for Morocco after earthquake, ignoring Lybia and Afghanistan disasters on bigger and similar scale less than few weeks later.
News publish stuff, it catches on. Usually it works with something close geographically or politically. NK is just as low down on News priorities like ethnic cleansing in China 🤷 No clicks on articles

There's been a lot of ongoing media and public interest in NK and what's going on there. The BBC did a big feature a few months ago talking about how people are managing since the pandemic. Lots of documentaries, books, articles.

It's an ongoing, grim, fascinating but ultimately inexorable catastrophe and it doesn't feel like anything we as individuals can do will make any difference, whereas Ukraine and Gaza are live conflicts, massively increased recent activity with constant international political wrangling and influence, and involvement of people connected to our own countries. They're a really different thing to NK.

There’s an old adage - if it bleeds it leads - and as disturbing as that sounds it’s true. Networks and newspapers are only interested in certain kinds of stories.

Someone mentioned the phrase that suits this to me years ago but can't remember it

It's sort of similar to why when they do appeals for endangered animals they use 'cute and fluffy' ones not some weird and ugly sea urchin or something like that

what Grilledsquid said. Also, for clarity, it wasn't a short film, it was 144 minutes long.

Too horrific - people just can’t imagine living under that regime and struggle to empathise.

Contained - it’s not going to affect anyone in the UK. Whereas conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East feel like they can spill over.

Short attention spans - NK has been horrific for a long time. Have you read Nothing to Envy?

Nothing we can do - with most conflicts the UK is involved in some way, which gives us a direct link (influence your MP, influence the government), but what can we possibly do to make any impact in North Korea?

What does kind of bother me about coverage of NK is not the lack of presence in nightly news type programmes, which is understandable in a slowly-evolving situation, but the… I don't know the words, really, but almost fetishisation of it. It's sometimes covered as though it's almost half historical exhibit, half dystopian science fiction movie, overlaid with a kind of exotic veil of mystery. But then, I suppose it can be difficult to put together coverage that doesn't feel a bit like that, given our cultural touchpoints.

Because mainstream media control what they want the public to think.

For example the plight of Christians in Nigeria is completely ignored

Since the turn of the 21st century, 62,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed by the terrorist group Boko Haram, Fulani herdsmen and other groups. The killings have been referred to as a silent genocide

There's more of a diaspora to Ukraine and Gaza and they are more open so more people who know people affected.

Also, harsh though it sounds, Ukraine and Gaza are stories of lots of people fighting for change, either politically or armed. NK is hard to get your head round because it's so ridiculously bad but few people are standing up and fighting. There's less to support and we all like to imagine we'd take to the streets if we were being treated like that. Obviously we just can't imagine the level of control and psychological damage done over decades of oppression.

@PaulCostinRIP your post was a lot more credible before you added the wake up sheeple cartoon 🤣

Generally the causes that attract attention are those which people personally identify with.

So conflict in Europe gets more attention than conflict in Africa.

Bad weather in the USA gets more attention than bad weather in the Netherlands.

I used to work for a health charity and we could get loads of media and fundraising if telling the story of a young, blond child but almost none if telling the story of a middle aged man or person from a minority ethnic background.