Good “News” and Bad “News”
Posted by admin | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 13-02-2009
So often today, all we see in the news is negativity. We are surrounded by awful images of murders, robberies, and catastrophic events. Day to day, we are faced with the world’s troubles and turmoil’s. It is all enough to make one person sick. However, would news be news if it were not bad. Is it not in our human nature to talk about the things that are going wrong in our lives, rather then the things that are going right. Who would care if today’s top headlines were, “man falls in love at 79″ or “cute cuddly cats make great pets”. Newspapers would stay on the shelves, and people would lose interest. So is negative news the only news?
Society has become adapt to hearing all of the worst-case scenarios in the news. However, the problem with this is we are sending a biased image of the world to the readers of these headlines. We lead them to believe that all teens are drug-addicted runaways, who cannot drive, let alone give birth to healthy babies. We make all Muslims look like terrorists, and white-collar men look like money laundering frauds. In fact these people are a select few, but after hearing about them over and over again, we tend to form an opinion about them, and we have no right to. We give into our brains need to form an opinion about things. So is it all that bad, or is it that if it is not all bad there is no money in the news.
In fact it is not all bad. We see it small print on page 6, “man saves 10 in house fire”. The heroes are there, but we choose to focus on the villains. All we are doing is keeping our society in a state of fear, where we are scared to be on our streets alone at night. Perhaps society is not the problem. Maybe it is the news companies who choose to do this to make money off of our fear. What they do not understand is that they are not only shaping our opinions, but the lives of these people who have now been labeled, and stereotyped. So the big question is whether or not society is good or bad. Perhaps the world is a great and safe place to be, but they just do not want us to know that.
