News & Media - Module 3

What is your stance on news and media?

TV
I really enjoyed Bill McKibben’s collection of work from the assigned articles, particularly, the “5:00 A.M.” selection, where he discusses TV and its associated power. In a sense, we are being played for fools. I know that “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here” is quite possibly one of the worst shows on television right now, but still…”there’s nothing else on,” I tell my husband. I don’t think the people behind such shows are thinking, “This is so good, I think we will be getting an Oscar…” More than likely, I am sure they are amused at the amount of people who do end up tuning in.

This reminds me of the ads for Hulu they have been running on TV as of late. If you don’t know what I am talking about, check out this clip from YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0cHkWeqnyg&feature=PlayList&p=0A8C763AD3202FFE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=6

The thing is, these commercials are funny because there is a part of us, sitting there watching our nightly shows that laugh along because we were told when we were younger that TV does rot our brain.

NEWS & FACTS
We had a problem with pigs in our neighborhood a while ago. I took pictures and sent them to a friend, who sent them to a friend, who sent them…you get the idea. They ended up in the hands of a local television reporter who called me because he wanted to do a story on the wild pigs in our community. Caught off guard, I agreed to the interview. When he and his camera person showed up at my door, I remarked, “Slow news day?” To which he replied, “Yeah…there’s nothing more that the viewers love than babies and animals, and you have both” (referring to my newborn and the wild pigs of course).

Why do I tell this story? In Carlin Romano’s The Grisly Truth about Bare Facts he elaborates on that very question, what makes something newsworthy? After graduating with my BA, I even worked in TV as a field producer and I have a hard time answering this question as the panel did in the discussion about privacy (p. 39). News is subjective – what one person considers newsworthy, such as the pig story, someone else may not. Facts have to be proven or disproved but these even can be presented to anyone’s liking. “Journalists can also make facts in a different way by manipulating the vagueness of language and choosing one word rather than another, one construction over another” (p. 68). A reporter, writer, or producer can spin facts any way they choose – companies, such as the tobacco industry, have been doing it for a very long time.