The death tracker that was glued to the shot of some cable news programs 24/7 in the US is an example of fear porn.

The model used by modern media is indefensible. It's the same with social media. Unprincipled and willing to do anything to attract viewership/engagement.

That's a massive oversimplification. Not only does this ignore the incentive structure of the media to make a story out of things that are not necessarily a story, but it doesn't factor in the general ignorance of the public and how these things like "mutants" and "variants" affect their psyche. An average IQ American, anyway, doesn't have a good grasp of how many people regularly die of things besides old age, so when you tell them every single day that X number of people are dying and that there are these scary sounding "variants", what you are effectively doing is brainwashing them.

Go out and ask random people what they think about the pandemic, and it's common that they think that they are at risk of death even if the data from the CDC demonstrates that they aren't. Heck, there are smart people on HN who can't assess risk particularly well.

When the media is constantly drumming COVID into everyone's heads while glossing over the fact that far fewer people are dying now, at the expense of other news items and at the ignorance of other epidemics killing people, yes, that's fear porn.

Do you really believe the job of the media is to update the population?

Isn’t it rather to maximize viewership, clicks, and profit?

It is fear porn. There have been THOUSANDS of known mutations throughout this pandemic. The “UK strain” has been known since September 2020. Did anyone talk about it? Do you think it’s a coincidence that this suddenly became a huge topic in the media literally the week the vaccine was rolled out?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Covid%20mu...

The real number is debatable because of defective tallying practices where coronavirus is given as cause of death even if there was no specific reason for doing so; hospitals are incentivized to do so because it results in funding.

But aside from that, let's not be so naive, eh? The media runs on sensationalism. The pandemic has been grossly mismanaged and there is absolutely no reason for the draconian lock down we're under. There hasn't been for 10 months. It was justifiable in the beginning because we didn't know what we were dealing with, but we have a much better grasp now and we know who is at risk to permit a much more fine-grained approach. Furthermore, much of the media fear mongering is driven by an ignorance of immunology and epidemiology. We have to remind ourselves that what we often "know" about the world beyond our own local lives is what we glean from the media filter. We should always approach that kind of knowledge with a bit of humility and caution. Journalists are not, shall we say, the creme-de-la-creme.

There's also the political angle. As Rahm Emanuel once said, you shouldn't let a crisis go to waste. There is a great deal to be made during a pandemic like this, monetarily, socially, politically, and otherwise, the so-called Great Reset[0] functioning as perhaps the paradigmatic example, whatever you happen to know or think of it.

Put yourself in the shoes of an ambitious but morally unscrupulous politician or billionaire. Would you so easily end the pandemic given the opportunities it presents, given how rare of an opportunity it poses for doing things you could not do under the usual circumstances? Even if you weren't quite sure what to do with it, you would at least have the instinct to know that the rarity of the situation merits careful consideration, though in this case, you would have had plenty of time to consider them (and frankly, think tanks are in the business of anticipating things; there are no doubt papers that describe how, if a certain set of circumstances were to emerge, certain political goals could be realized).

So yeah, announcing variants of COVID is fine per se, as long as such things are contextualized. The media is often an instrument of decontextualization which leads to confusion and poor judgement (just think about how they report scientific articles, not as one exchange in the cacophony of scientific publications, but as some Definitive Judgement of The Science!). At this point, I have no problem acknowledging the merit in the OP's quip, namely, not that we be cynical, but that it's high time we started employing some common sense instead of just drinking the media Koolaid.

[0] https://www.weforum.org/great-reset/