Paul Sorol
Now this one might have been better in the random section.
I am at a loss to explain it for you.
It is possible that the saying refers to the endless peddling of bad news through what the journos call ‘if it bleeds it leads’, a rule that has become pervasive.
A few years ago there was an image on US television of fires in Australia where the size of the icon locating each of the 100 or so blazes suggested to the uninitiated that the whole continent was ablaze, all 7.69 million km2 of the place.
Fires in Australia are dangerous, challenging and potentially disastrous locally but they are never more than a few thousand hectares at any one time.
This misinformation is the seed.
Well it was misinformation until 2019 when the fires coalesced into blazes of hundreds of thousands of hectares in size – prescience perhaps.
