News, Is It Really?

You don't really need to find out what's going on

You don't really want to know just how far it's gone

Just leave well enough alone

Eat your dirty laundry

Don Henley - Dirty Laundry

Here are some questions without trying to sound political. When did newscasting lose its soul? When did it become okay to use mass media to make us afraid? Why do we continue to feed the machine of sensationalism and shallowness? Why do we even care if those in the spotlight did normal human things like getting married, divorced, reproduced, or made a HUGE mistake? 

Here is a social experiment for you to do at home that does not require a lab coat or a team of analysts. Watch one newscast, whether it is local or national, for one week. It is only 150 minutes of time, which is 2 1/2 hours of your life. Each night, keep track of:

• How many minutes out of 30 are used for commercials?
• Of the commercials that were shown, how many in total were there, 
• What was the content for each of the ads?
• For each of the five nights, make notations regarding the content for each of the news items? You can even categorize the genres if you prefer.
• For each night, make another notation on whether or not the last story of the broadcast was a fluffy, feel-good story.

Create a chart of some sort and then begin to group things together by commonalities. If you want, the following week, invest another 2 1/2 hours by repeating the same process but switching from national to local or local to national, commercials and all. Repeat the chart making process again and compare the two. Now, write an essay on what we are focusing on as a nation and who is paying the bucks to sponsor the news.

If you truly want to see what is at the core of our modern newscast, this experiment is almost as interesting as facing the wrong way on an elevator. I may have tipped my feelings of what I found out at the beginning of this post, but this is something just for you to do. Your conclusions are your own, as are your reasoning and logical reflections. 

We depend on the news to find out what is going on in the world. We no longer have to rely on a newspaper and four channels to satisfy our curiosity. Anyone with an opinion and an internet account can broadcast news. My fear is we have not remembered lessons that were taught to us in 1898, 1917, 1929, 1938, and so many others. We let what is broadcast as truths affect us. We can be whipped up into a frenzy of fear and even hate. We allow mistruths to occur as if certain people have a "Get Out of Jail Free" card without wondering why these lies no longer bother us. We condone restrictions and loss of freedoms and privacy to feel safer. Even worse, when someone has the courage to tell us the truth, we condemn them to ridicule and ostracization. 

The lesson is simple, accept but verify.