Thursday, August 16, 2012
Why is it news?
The other night I was watching TV. It was almost seven and I was waiting for the last bit of the previous show to end. I started watching it and realized they were talking about phone etiquette. It was interesting and funny. And then I realized it was a news show. How does phone etiquette count as news? News should be about conflicts, tragedies, or weather, not somebody telling you when and when not to answer your cell phone. And then they talked about the picture of Obama. Is a picture of him, where it looks like he's holding the sun, really important? No. It doesn't affect his political campaign or policies. Then why is it news? Our news is nothing more than entertainment with a few important stories. It is a way to get just enough facts to gossip, even though you don't know the whole story. They spend 45 seconds on a "important" story and then on to the next or a commercial. You don't even have time to let it sink in and it doesn't affect us. Why is news another source of entertainment?
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I find this rather funny as well, because everything seems to aim for entertainment these days rather than to inform. The news started putting in little segments of celebrity gossip just to provide entertainment. I believe that this is caused by the society's constant need to be entertained. We always crave for something interesting, otherwise we don't exactly voluntarily pay attention to these shows. The news has evolved from an informative piece of media to another form of entertainment, thanks to our society's constant desire for it to be. The news isn't boring anymore, but it isn't as informative either.
ReplyDeleteThere just trying to find a way of keeping viewers on watching the news more often, so that way they can make more money. Also, if you pay close attention to the news reporters you can see they look like they just came out of some fancy magazine cover. All they are really thinking about is getting more viewers and bigger paychecks. They even have the nerve of putting themselves in situations that shouldn’t involve them; they would also try to find murder stories and international disasters just to get more viewers. It’s also very sad to know that the international disaster or any other tragic incident only gets five minutes to be talked about, and then a subject is changed to some beauty product. The news reporters are a little twisted as well because once they announce a tragedy you can see that they turn serious and perhaps monotonous, but once they switch to a happier subject it just looks like they’ve been smiling the whole time in the newscast.
ReplyDeleteI think they use that kind of "news" to get more and more people to watch their show. For example you didn't even know you were watching the news after a while and the phone etiquette reeled you in and you watched it. If the newscasters threw in more entertainment news the they would get more viewers which pays their check every other week. It's all about ratings and the views. I honestly think if they just had a show with all "real" news then not as many people would watch it because there is nothing they can do about the tragedies that is going on around them but they surely are interested about a picture of Obama and his election.
ReplyDeleteThe news is another way to try and get us to watch new tv shows, they reall aren't sharing important news just news that'samusing to viewers.
ReplyDeleteThe news in America is centered more around entertainment than it is to inform us on what is going on in our community, state, country, and world. I compared American newspaper and news broadcasts to the ones from Guatemala and my findings were rather surprising. When I watched the news here I saw that there was more dancing, singing, joking, and gossiping going on rather than informing. In Guatemala the poor news reporters struggle to clearly articulate all the information to the spectators. They try to say as much as possible in a little bit of time. The same differences may be observed in the newspapers. In our newspapers a lot about fashion and such topics are talked about which have nothing to do with news. On the other hand in countries like Guatemala every sentence in the newspaper has importance to it.The bottom line is that the newspapers and news in America are a big disappointment since they are used for entertainment purposes instead of what they were created for.
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