What is worst, the Royal Baby, or beer at the Rugby World Cup?

I mean, seriously. Please get yourself a (virtual!) Royal Baby Beer and look at all the news:

What is worst, the Royal Baby, or beer at the Rugby World Cup? /img/royal-baby-beer.jpg

While I’m writing these lines, more and more people on social media are getting upset because the home pages of major mainstream media worldwide look more or less like this one of the Guardian:

What is worst, the Royal Baby, or beer at the Rugby World Cup? /img/royal-baby-vs-mass-extinction.jpg

that is because a new very rich, very privileged baby who’s quite unlikely to ever suffer personally from climate change or mass extinctions gets almost as much exposure as much coming human suffering worldwide, and a bleaker, impoverished planet.

While I understand the feeling, I dare strongly suggest people to not let themselves be distracted from other pairs of news to compare, like this one just a few lines below the “more royal babies, less biodiversity” area:

What is worst, the Royal Baby, or beer at the Rugby World Cup? /img/water-restrictions-vs-rugby-world-cup.png

While species go extinct, the stuff of nightmares for rugby fans is “fears that bars and restaurants in host cities could run out of beer during the 2019 Rugby World Cup”, next September to November. Compare that with:

Take home message?

Maybe all Royal Babies should stop being royal, maybe they shouldn’t. It doesn’t really matter, because there are just a handful of them every generation these days. Besides, if royal families are listed before major cities getting short of water in 2019 is may be the editors' fault, certainly not theirs. To change that, just boycott whatever product you see advertised inside those articles and move on.

In any case, never stop at the first two or three “news”, whatever they are. Always strive to have the widest picture of what is happening, and what is more urgent and more effective: let’s all start to:

  • drink less of any water-intensive beverage
  • pay more attention to really relevant news, and their connections

(Source of “royal baby beer” image is here)