We’ve reached an era of news in which the Internet dominates how many, if not most, people consume their chosen news outlet. Simply, it is just more convenient to stroll through the front page of a news website, catching the highlights, than it is to sit through an hour-long news program. And with the 24-hour news cycle, which repeats information and stories more often than off-season sports networks, it’s understandable that this shift to quick and easy has happened. People are busy.
But something has arisen in this new era of media, two somethings, in fact: sensationalism and desensitization.
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These are not new concepts at all, but they are harmful, and have become staples in what has come to define current media.
Sensationalism is “the use of exciting or shocking stories or language at the expense of accuracy, in order to provoke public interest or excitement.”
Now, is there anything in that definition that doesn’t bother you?
Journalism has shifted from an institution based on exposing the truth and being more accountable to the public than the actual politicians (which, in a way, was messed up to begin with), and it has morphed into that guy in the sci-fi movie that shouts “we’re all gunna die!” and whips all the red shirts into a frenzy.
In this sensationalist media, we also have desensitization, or “the diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative or aversive stimulus after repeated exposure to it.”
See the problem?
We have a juggernaut media system bent on upping the ante with the most shocking stories, while a public is repeatedly exposed to these increasingly shocking stories. The media isn’t upping the ante just because it can; it has to.
Without these more increasingly shocking stories, people actually get bored. You can't just report on a murder, you have to say how they died. You can’t just report on a car crash, you have to show the flipped over or smashed car. You put the car or the blood or whatever in the thumbnail to get people to click on your article.
The articles with the flashiest and most controversial titles will get the more clicks, which mean more money for the company, because clicks mean advertisements. It’s a logical system and one that works well for them, but it skimps the reader. Articles have become focused more on expediency and less on content.
The worst part of it all has to be the complacency, though. We are so used to this system that we just go along with it, even when it’s not current news related. Websites like Buzzfeed have literally made a career off of click bait titles. We are so willing to let media be easy for us that we just go along with this increasingly sensationalist news cycle that pries more on fear or morbid curiosity than genuine interest.
So, to bring it all together, we have a media based on expediency, with short and seemingly ‘concrete’ titles that don’t really tell the story. Rather, they rely on people’s increasingly numbed but morbid curiosity to itch its way into the back of the reader’s mind enough for them to click on the article or sit through the five or so minute segment on the gruesome murder or equally gruesome car crash until that itch is satisfied. Once it has been satisfied, the media will have to once again step their game up to make their audience want to click on their article again.
Slowly, the great media snake eats itself. And we are okay with it.
I’m only 22. I’m not going to pretend that this is special or that I know when this all began. I am not the first person to notice this or talk about it. And my input on this will have zero effect on what the media is like or how people perceive the media.
We will all continue to use our preferred outlet, and watch the evening news if we want, or slide through the websites online. The sensationalism will fury on, while the desensitization will seep ever further into the minds of society.
