For the longest time I’ve ignored television news and turned to Google News for almost all of my news. Quite frankly, I’m tired of the fluff; a 5 minute segment on who the next American Idol is going to be is not and never will be news. Other than that my second complaint about media is everything is sensationalized and a majority of the focus is on negative pieces. The few positive stories that air are often squeezed in as the last segment.
My local newspaper’s website has a comments section on every article I frequently read through the comments. Today being Sunday there were a lot of fluff pieces such as local success stories and the like. Along with a cop stabbing and negative piece about a local hospital there were two positive stories one a about a local girl who grew up in a bad neighborhood and made something of herself, another congratulating a local police force for cleaning up gang a gang infested apartment complex.
Here’s the number of comments for each story:
Cop stabbing: 14 comments
Hospital: 9 Comments
Gang Cleanup: 2
Successful Girl: 0
What does that tell you? Is all the negativity being reported truly the media machine’s fault for publishing mostly the worst in people or are negative stories what people demand by reaction and viewer ship?
I tell you what I think; Even though a lot of people complain about the news people still like to know there are people more screwed up then themselves out there. This way people can sit on their little perch, gloat about how great they are, ruminate on how they would never do such a thing, where things went wrong, and judge others. You know the old saying “Sex Sells”? Today it’s “Sex, Violence, and Negativity sell.”
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