Sensationalized News
- October 14, 2002
- 1 comment
I’ve grown tired of the news these days. They’ve been rehashing the same stories 40 times over. Iraq this, Al Qaeda this, DC sniper that… it’s just about all you see and hear these days in the news. I’ve made well over 30 posts on the subjects. I don’t have much more to say that hasn’t already been said.
I was thinking the other day that news (especially since 9/11) has become more sensationalized, more dramatic than what it used to be. It’s become more of a form of entertainment. Everything is slanted, one way or the other. It’s very hard to find an article that just tells you what’s going on without throwing in some obviously biased sentence or paragraph. And in terms of Robert Fisk, his entire article is bogus. My “crap filter” has become full these days trying to sift through all the crap to find the bits of real news and truth out there. After a while, I just have to take a break and clean it out.
Before the advent of CNN and the 24 hour news channels, your news was pretty much limited to your local newspaper, your local TV news and in the evening was the round up of all the national and international news on Nightline or whatever. It seemed that people were more aware of their local happenings and participated in them more. You saw something on the local news, and you talked about it with your co-workers, family and friends the next day. These days, it’s all about events that are distant, almost irrelevant to where I am in life. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t know about important issues in our society or in the world. What I am saying is that today’s news (as it’s presented) distracts from the more important local news and numbs the mind by repetition. When you see a subject presented over and over and over, your mind begins to tune it out. And in the case of the DC-area sniper, it actually encourages the subject of the news to continue killing because of the press coverage.
Anyway, all this to say I’m going to be taking a small break from the major news stories (Iraq, Al Qaeda, November elections, etc.), unless there’s a big breaking news story. I need to rest my mind from the constant barrage of slanted, sensational news so I can decipher what’s crap and what’s not again.
the media has always been this way since I could remember. I remember when I was a child and I watched the news. At that time, desert storm was going on, and the news was as sensationalized as a celebrity wedding. It was always put out to be more than it actually was. This war that we have been fighting over in Iraq is wrong. Right now, Saddam is not in control, so why are we still beating a dead horse? Becuase America wants its enemies to be dead! The news has showed so many sensationalized stories that we still want our damn war! We continue to march on because it feels right! Because we have seen through the news how horrible society is over there, we continue to fight in a war that is directly parallel to Vietnam! All because we see flashes still on the news of our World trade buildings being destroyed. We continue to fight a war that is over-sensationalized, over-reported, and never given any kind of positive reports.