The world moves in a swirl of chaos. Every second of every day, we are exposed to global news events and for many reasons it has become more challenging to give a single story the attention it deserves.
The 21 century scoop of capitalistic ideals does not help the media outlets deliver significant material to its audience. Quite clearly, the economic constraints rather explain why the media approach has gone from informing its audience about things they need to know, to relying on the same people to determine what’s newsworthy.
In other words, modern media is bossed by citizen journalism and the greed for money, which together redefine what used to be serious headlines to an overflow of sex and celebrities. Neetzan Zimmerman, former editor of Gawker, explained the Web-climate on The Daily Show.
“Always lead with sex if you can,” Zimmerman said. “Nowadays, it doesn’t matter if a story is real. The only thing that really matters is whether people click on it.”
Maybe I just envy people like Miley Cyrus for being clever enough to get front-page attention with her intentional PR-tricks. But one shouldn’t buckle up serious journalism in the backseat with entertainment. Unfortunately, thanks to social media sites and news corporations inviting the public into discussions, we often fail to find space for real issues, which is problematic — especially so now.
Recently, the top U.S. military official warned the world for being at risk of becoming immune to the suffering caused by growing international crises, according to militarytimes.com.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, who serves as the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it "a historical shame" if the world doesn't realize it is reaching a point where it becomes insensitive to the magnitude of the problems caused by global issues.
Let’s be honest. News organizations can’t handle everything solo. For instance, after the Ebola outbreak last year, the New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, said, “We can’t do 100 stories on Ebola when there are 50 other important topics to cover. There’s a limited number of stories we can cover that way, and that’s just reality.”
But we need to understand that what goes viral on the Web hardly ever is a coincidence, but merely a kind of cultivation effect. The media reports on stories after our desire to hear them, thereby fueling the perceptions we have on a specific culture, minority or person, and the stereotypes will linger. It becomes an evil cycle that eventually might lead to us taking stands towards something we really don’t have a clue about.
I get it. There’s so much going on in the world that we cannot simply learn about everything, even less do something about it. Of course, we would rather want to hear about a car explosion, killing none, in a civilized urbanization like our own, than hearing of mysterious Albino kidnappings and the killings of innocent children in faraway Africa. We desire what we can relate to, our environment, what could be us.
So where’s the problem in that?
Well, let’s go back to the Ebola hype for a moment. Since the notion of the outbreak in the West, it took months before any American news outlet reported on the deadly virus. People got infected, died. Worse. But the wrong type of people… Once an American was involved, all news outlets went bananas, and the focus steered towards preventing Ebola to spread across the country.
The gross reporting helped stabilize the country and make the infectious bacteria go away, sure. Although, what also took fire was the tiredness to hear about the disease — something that no longer were to affect anyone in your friend zone anymore. That’s what sociologists call a public burnout. We heard about Ebola constantly until the day it was out of our sight, but before the issue had been fully resolved.
In fact, the deadly crisis in the outbreak zone remained (and still does, to some extent); many African countries faced economic issues — one of the countries affected, Tanzania, is located thousands of miles away from the outbreak zone, and has had less contact with Ebola than the U.S. — as Americans canceled their flights to the continent; and we got even more stereotypes to add on the list about Africa: AIDS, Malaria and Ebola. Check.
Despite the probable case that nobody has stuck around to read up to this point — no topless people posing or any juicy celebrity gossip to go on about — the escalation into some form of opinionated Web format is not a fair way to stay tuned with the news. Heck, "Keeping up with the Kardashians" has its own TV-thingy already! It’s about time we give the actual news some room for its own agenda again, for everyone’s sake.
