Friday, May 2, 2008

Student rant

This week's rant is from Nicole from Mayfield.

I am sick and tired of how low the media has become with the news, just a couple days ago I was watching E! News and they had a news story on how People had a news story on 101 Most Beautiful People. Honestly who cares! I would rather know things that would eventally affect my life. News is defined as "a report of a recent event; intelligence; information". The media need to expand on subjects that inform people on world events not just what is happening in America.


EDITOR'S NOTE: I agree with this post. Last night, I was flipping around the channels and E! was doing some countdown of the most violent news stories. Of course, Columbine was getting a lot of airtime.

My lingering question was/is: Why does there need to be a countdown for this (violent stories)? What's the point? I felt like it was glamorizing violence.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The tail has been wagging the dog for many years now, when it comes to the news business.

Prior to this happening, veteran journalists decided what was news and how it was to be presented. Sure, they made mistakes. Their work wasn't perfect. But their morning news planning meetings didn't consist of focus group results and memos from a consultant.

Today news meetings are driven by what the public wants, not what it needs. Money talks in news, too. When the media owners tell news executives they want to pull in the 18-35 year old women demographic, news directors tell reporters to find stories that would appeal to women 18-35.

This is why the phenomenon of health and medical news (most of it, dangerously thin on detail) and other things you might find in a typical magazine geared toward women in this age bracket.

Even though there is certainly enough space here to go on and on, I am short on time to continue my rant on this. Suffice to say, the next time you see something on TV news you think is crap, then it is crap...and you should cease to watch that channel. Within two weeks you will find you have nothing left to watch for news. I guarantee it.

Mark Williamson

Cliff said...

I followup to Mark's comment, I would like to add that before there was cable networks and internet, we were able to get our complete news fix with thirty minutes local(news, weather, sports) and thirty minutes national news.

I don't see why we need hour upon hour of infotainment.