Quest for humanity

I'm not sure if this applies in other countries too, but I've noticed that in Finland, certain part of the media is treating famous people (actors, athletes, royals etc.) more and more like some non-human robot creatures, whose only purpose is to entertain us.

For quite a time now this has applied to relationship tragedies of celebrities - what's one's heartbreak, is news papers sensational headline. This is rather unfortunate but still in some way better than what it has turned into now.

As most of people already know, the entire team of Lokomotiv Jaroslavl died in plane crash couple of weeks ago. I assume the common reaction to the news was something including "god, this is terrible, I can't even imagine how horrible it must be for their family, relative and friends". However, one of the biggest news providers here (and also the company that holds broadcasting rights to all national team games, Olympics excluded) figured it would be appropriate to make headlines that completely ignore the human tragedy. As a result we got headlines with ALL CAPS AND FILLED WITH QUESTION MARKS EXCLAMATION POINTS.

As an example of this I can mention the one that got stuck in my head and is the reason why I have avoided their site ever since - "FOUR GOLD MEDALS GONE??". And I really mean they wrote "gold medals", not gold medalists. Because clearly hockey players aren't human beings.

Another trend seemed to be to only care about Finns, even though none was on the plane. How the Finns close to KHL felt about that and so on. I admit this is somewhat understandable but I doubt former KHL's coach opinion about Russia's aviation safety is more important than the tiny fact that the one survived player was fighting for his life. It is somewhat human to be more effected by tragedies that happen to people you know/like/admire/have some kind of relation to but being mostly ignorant toward the loss of dozens of lives (even when not Finnish or deeply related to Finnish hockey) seems bit cold to me.

Another - though less tragic - example of objectifying famous people here is the way Princess Victoria's (of Sweden) upcoming trip to Finland was handled in tabloids. As she's pregnant, of course the natural way to headline the story about where you can see her during the visit is along lines "You can see the baby belly here". Like she wasn't a person anymore, just a walking belly.

To sum this up, I'm seriously losing my faith in humankind.