The reason I start this post of on such a depressing note is that it brought back a recurring issue to the front of my mind: The proper role of the news media in today's society. Now I don't claim to be a journalism major or have any idea what I am talking about, but I'm going to ask questions and speculate on possible answers. The following mass of words will probably be unorganized and pretty incoherent.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to make light of the events that occurred at VT. As I said before this is a serious tragedy.
To use the VT shootings as an example, this story will be covered by all of the major news networks for the next week or two at least (to make a conservative estimate). It made front page headlines in pretty much every daily newspaper with an eye towards national events. Everyone who doesn't live in a cave or under a rock will know to varying extents what happened. This event has the highest death count of any gun homicide in America to date. That being said, it pales in comparison to the genocide that happens daily in Darfur and other non-western nations, at least to my understanding. However the news coverage on these incidents is not even close to the coverage that the VT shootings will get. The VT stuff is a national incident while the genocide I mentioned earlier is international which may play a fairly large role in the varying amounts of coverage.
Lets take a different example instead. Fairly recently, celebrity Anna Nichole Smith died of mysterious causes in a room in Florida. This, along with the resulting legal stuff surrounding her child, was headline news for a solid 2-3 weeks. Now I can understand arguments as to why the VT incident should receive more news coverage, but I find if terribly difficult to rationalize how one of the largest story worth reporting in the entire world for this period of time is about some celebrity.
Basically I've come to understand that news media is more about entertainment value now than actually reporting news that people need to hear. Perhaps "entertaining" isn't the best word, especially when applying it to the VT incident. "Interesting" could also be used. This is especially applicable to television news, but is also prevalent in many news magazines and newspapers. Of course, this has always been the case to some extent and always will be with a capitalist news media independent of the government. The population itself is partly to blame as well. News stations play what people want to watch so that they can get more viewers and make more money. If the people would rather hear about a celebrity death than a depressing story about genocide in Africa or an investigative report into government corruption, then that is what will be shown. I would very much like to see more investigative reporting on mainstream television but that is not likely to happen.
I will touch on some more questions related to my somewhat cynical take on the media hopefully in the next post.
So we've fixed you with cement galoshes...
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