I Read the News Today - Oh Boy...

What's happened to news? Since the creation of the Internet, smart phones and the ever increasing technological gadgets, it seems as though traditional news has been forced to back into a corner. Making way for the entrance of blogs and pseudo news sources. Websites such as The Huffington Post are quickly establishing themselves as reputable sources of hard hitting news. With the potentially injuring big time media players, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, in their attempts to be relevant during these changing times. Let me be clear: The news is not dead, nor dying. In fact, it's very much alive and is thriving to its fullest potential. The oral tradition of breaking news will continue to survive despite budget cuts and economic meltdowns. The problem is that we, as readers, are having a difficult time differentiating between what is and is not news. The belief that news is slowly being nailed to the coffin is due to the uncontrolled amount of tabloid gossip bleeding into the newsroom. In order to make both their advertisers and readers happy, editors are forced to assign stories that are no longer as innovative or relevant. Gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow, one of journalism's greatest figures, noting his honesty and integrity in delivering the news. Whom was the first to report from the war zone during WW2, bringing what he named, "breaking news", which was listened to directly within most every home.

Readers continue to salivate over breaking news, in hopes to satisfy their thirst to be enthralled and entertained by the media. We demand our journalists to be objective, honest and relevant - creating a dilemma of what can be news and how it is presented.
We are now becoming accustomed to entertainment-biased news. Just to give you a few examples would be some of the one-liners about health care and same-sex marriages embedded within a series of Lindsay Lohan mishaps and Mel Gibson tirades. Is that really news? How are we supposed to act as the faithful watchdogs of the media if we can't even tell the difference between gossip and actual news? In September's issue of Gentleman's Quarterly Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson writes a humorous commentary on how the Web is changing the way he absorbs the news in this day and age. "I'm starting to worry a bit about what the Web and aggregating news sites are doing to our sense of what is news and what isn’t," Nelson writes. "It's cool that there are zillion more options for news, opinion combined with attitudes besides newspapers. But what does concern me is why are so many of them starting to bleed together? Like one massive churning, self-feeding, very blandish sphere?"

Nelson in my opinion is correct and right on the mark. It’s entirely OK to have an array of options of what we'd like to read as the news, but first, we must be given the opportunity to be presented with the choices of news that we can read. Without drawing a line of what is and isn't news, we are beginning to put ourselves in a difficult situation where the lines blur too closely between entertainment and actual relevancy. Perhaps we need a few more of the likes of Ed Murrow where we can come to simply read and understand unbiased new without the need to decipher the truth within the news.

 

Just give me the real stories unbiasedly...not sensationally.