So I am reading a random status from a random friend of mine on Facebook. “The news is soooo depressing.” It is natural to be depressed with constant reports of bickering in the white house to additional troops sent to Afghanistan to random murders happening locally. These type of news story doesn't bring ratings and today, we get our news by people putting their spin on them. For the past couple of years I noticed our news has transitioned to something else. No longer do we see what is actually happening for us to judge ourselves, but another person’s opinion on what is happening. News is nearly dead, not because of what we call bias, but because of commentary.
A car drives down the street. The driver constantly honks, getting the attention of the neighbors. The paint finish on the car is pastel pink with polkadots all over and bird droppings on the hood. Now with that said, the news headline would read “Man in ugly car annoys neighbors.” On TV, we will get several “experts” commenting about the man. On another channel, we will have a commentary about why people should not honk their horns in a residential area. Gone is the actual reporting. Whether writing an actual news article, the writer doesn’t describe what the car looks like and simply calls it ‘ugly.’ The writer also does not interview any of the neighbors to even confirm whether they were truly annoyed or if they understood what the man was doing. Then when you go on TV, already we would be hearing how people ‘feel’ about it. We the viewer however already developed an opinion based on what we read and hear without getting real facts, and we are not willing to spend extra time in our lives on research because we simply have more pressing matters, but if we were asked to poll how we felt about the guy in the car, we’d hang him on a stick.
That is what news is to me today. We almost never get the real story whether it is our public policy or a world event. If the language presented to us is too fuzzy for us to understand then we would be dependent on a translator. Often times that translator ends up spewing commentary and his (or her) two cents about the matter. The Bill O Reilys, Keith Olbermanns, Glenn Becks, Jon Stewarts and countless bloggers are our real source of news, unfortunately. These men (and women) don’t report. They do have a good understanding on what’s going on in the world and have already shaped the public’s opinion. For most of us in this country, we are not journalists and we would not look up the real facts ourselves unless we are paid handsomely for these efforts as do these commentators. As a result, their shows achieve higher ratings than their actual news programs. Want to know why we hate Fox News? It is not because it is ‘allegedly’ off a right slant (that’s another discussion), it is because the majority of its programming are commentators in a shouting match over what’s happening in Washington and around the world. This is far more appealing than watching the actual news and it shows by Bill O Reily’s ratings. News is simply too depressing to watch. Why not get entertained by people arguing about it?
As the internet becomes our daily (more like hourly) newspaper, it also gets inundated with other commentators providing their own ‘spin’ on the issues as we affectionately call “Blogging.” Anybody who posts articles on their Facebook (me included) is guilty for following specific blogs because they share and shape our views of the world. As much as I for example personally should read right leaning blogs to ‘balance’ my views, I don’t simply because I’ll get pissed since the majority of them seem antagonize a person such as myself. Despite that, the layout of huffingtonpost.com is too nicely designed for me to read another site, and Huffingtonpost has a tendency to oversensationalize events and have misleading headlines as opposed to its actual article.
Bottom line, while commentators and bloggers are not exactly the ‘end of the world’,’ media outlets need to find again that responsibility of actually broadcasting actual news and letting us judge for ourselves. Maybe npr.org is the only real news outlet out there because they’re not commericially funded, but until they make their site more eye-catching, I’m doomed to read Huffington Post. What we need is another reporter who just describes, not spin.
Posts
