Chapter 13: The News Media

Chapter 13: The News Media

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Monday, February 17, 2014

Vol XCIII, No. 311

The News Media and Advertising

• Many Americans get their news from TV. An entire TV network, CNN (Cable News Network), was created in the early 1980s to provide nothing but “news”.

• Some criticize TV news. There is sometimes silly chitchat that goes on among the members of the TV news team. There are only 22 minutes of actual news. The remainder of the time is taken up by commercials. Some even call television news “infotainment”.

• Often, we watch TV to achieve the basic gratification of being distracted from life’s pressures – to escape. Therefore, commercials promise relief and fulfillment. After all, the search for momentary gratification brings us to TV in the first place.

• The message seems to be: However significant the problems in our community, our individual problems and needs are just as important. However pressing a need there is for local, national, or global change, fulfilling our personal needs comes first.

• Many of us accept this fact and just say “that’s the way it is.” What can we do about it?

• However, unlike other TV shows, which are driven by entertainment value, news broadcasts claim to serve the nobler journalistic mission of creating an informed – and ultimately empowered – citizenry.

• Is it strange that the serious “news” is interrupted with commercials that ask us to buy products or services in order to fulfill our desires?

• The TV audience is wrapped in a paradigm of consumption which is the idea that we are constantly receiving messages that present us with a blend of problems and daily events (the news) with messages that urge personal gratification.

How does Jon Stewart criticize CNN?

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/tlwgqa/cnn-leaves-it-there

Defining News

What is News?

• CNN Radio once said: “You give us two minutes, we’ll give you the world,” and “A whole day’s news, every half hour.” The world in two minutes? That’s a ridiculous shortening of the complexity and variety of daily life. Yet that is how the world is constructed for us by most of the press.

• The press – the American institution that brings us news – gives us information about local politics, global economic trends, natural disasters, celebrity escapades, and a million other things.

• TV news only has twenty-two minutes per broadcast to give people the news of the day. Think about the amount of news that doesn’t get reported in the world, the country, and your town on a daily basis.

• News can be defined as what newspapers and newscasters decide is newsworthy. The people who run the papers, write the stories, and edit the news have to decide what is news and what is not. They do this by following tradition and by making educated guesses about what the reading, viewing, or listening public wants to know.

• News favors events that are unusual. For example, the fact that thousands of airplanes land and take off safely every day is an amazing feat yet not news. However, if one airplane crashes, or even blows a tire while landing, it is news because it is so uncommon.