Media Irresponsibility

I don’t know if the news was any better back in the day, but it can’t have been any worse.  It seems a new low is reached every day.  Remember the grilled Cheesus?  That seems positively highbrow compared to some of the things I’ve seen lately.

On the websites of both Yahoo! and AOL, there was a link to an article about how “devastated” Lamar Odom and Khloe Kardashian were after they were involved in a car wreck that killed a 15 year-old kid.  I’m sure they were, but shouldn’t the focus have been on the family of the victim?  I know that the only reason this death was reported at all was because those two were involved, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the family didn’t want to engage with the media in their time of grief.  But neither article seemed even slightly interested in the actual tragedy, only in how their precious celebrities feel.  After the accident, Kardashian tweeted, “Angels are surrounding me always...Thank you!”  Not one word about the poor kid.  

Disclaimer: I don’t follow her on Twitter, so for all I know she could have expressed her

condolences before or after that tweet.  I refuse to look at her Twitter to find out.

I can see why celebrities are consider celebrities newsworthy because they are public figures.  But not everything that is newsworthy should be on the front page.  Why is it cost-efficient to pay millions of dollars for pictures for pictures of an infant who has done nothing more than be born to famous parents?  Because there are even more millions of people out there that will buy the magazine simply because it has that picture on its cover.  As far as I’m concerned, “celebrity news” magazines should be no more popular than a newspaper printing stories about a Bat boy-chupacabra sex tape.  Actually, now that I think about it, it should be way less popular than that newspaper.  

Unfortunately, it gets worse.  A CBS affiliate in Chicago aired a story about a night of violence in which a 16-year-old was killed and two others hurt.  During an interview with a four-year-old witness, an anchor asked if the boy would stay away from guns.  The answer that was seen on TV was “I’m going to have me a gun!”, after which the interview ended and the anchor commented, “That is very scary indeed.”  However, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education got a copy of the entire interview.  As it turns out, there was an unaired portion in which the anchor asks why the boy wants a gun, to which he replies, “I’m going to be the police!”  Stay classy, Chicago.

As depressing as the success of celebrity “news” is, the racism is even worse.  The unfair representation of minorities in the media is nothing new.  But editing a recorded interview with the intention of portraying a four-year-old boy as a stereotypical gangbangin’ black kid is disgusting.  The worst part about it is that that’s a financially successful way to run a news network; if it bleeds, it leads.  The fact that the truth was uncovered is only mildly encouraging.  I sincerely doubt this was an isolated incident. 

I understand that journalism is a business, and a successful business has to appeal to enough customers to make money.  It’s just a shame that enough people consume the dumbed-down garbage produced  by so many media outlets that it’s actually profitable.  Never mind the fact that fewer people watch the news and read the paper; the public never should have accepted this as news in the first place.  Like I said, there’s a place in the news for celebrities.  But it should be sandwiched between black and white ads in the middle of the paper, not above the fold.