One of my students made an excellent point in a response paper the other day. He cited Charlie Gibson on ABC World News Tonight at some point last week (may have been the week before). Apparently Gibson made the following comments:
One item from Baghdad today. The news is… that there is no news. The police told us that, to their knowledge, there were no major acts of violence. Attacks are down in Baghdad and today no bombings or roadside explosions were reported.
My student took offense to the second sentence – that the news is that there is no news since there were no attacks. My student, correctly, deduced that if no attacks = no news, then does the mass media assume that attacks = news? Further, is it fair to the American masses that their media outlets are dictating what is “news” and what is not?
The student made many good points in his paper and I was impressed with his logic. Truly, no one can deny that today’s major media outlets and media figures are generally skewed far to the left or far to the right. This particular example shows that some media consider the only newsworthy items in Iraq to be those that are negative. For all that I’m worth, I wait to hear about new Iraqi schools being built or to hear about how the infrastructure of the country is being rebuilt. I once saw a story about the Iraqi stock market (I think it was on MSNBC) and it was fascinating!
This stuff is “news” – even though people aren’t dying! Anyway, take a Google search of this particular topic and you’ll find some interesting pages out there. Enjoy!
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