Thursday, November 17, 2011
I am often critical of Media News Coverage. Take Amy Winehouse's death: the top news organizations all covered her death ad nauseum, but the monumental famine in Somalia received 5 minutes of airtime that day.
I have absolutely no opinion on whether people should mourn her or not. . .people are free to mourn anything and anyone. I am questioning the lack of perspective in our media coverage.
I am not asking people to do anything here, I don't have a horse in the race of whether people mourn her or not.
I do a serious concern that 99% of people in America can tell me that she died because of the media covering her death, but a substantially smaller percentage would be aware of the famine in Somalia, because of the "selective" nature of news coverage in pandering to "bumper sticker" reporting.
The fact that CNN tried to further dramatize the event by playing the "cause of death unknown" card while having Dr. Drew opine on addiction made this coverage even more ridiculous.
People not getting news with proper context and perspective is a big deal. . . that's how we end up following Lady Gaga and Paris Hilton only to wake one day and realize that because of the budget cuts that we were NOT following, half of the engineering department at college X has been eliminated.
Again, is it news that a 27 year old artist died. . .YES. . .in context, should it dwarf 11,000 people dying of famine?
NO!
I have absolutely no opinion on whether people should mourn her or not. . .people are free to mourn anything and anyone. I am questioning the lack of perspective in our media coverage.
I am not asking people to do anything here, I don't have a horse in the race of whether people mourn her or not.
I do a serious concern that 99% of people in America can tell me that she died because of the media covering her death, but a substantially smaller percentage would be aware of the famine in Somalia, because of the "selective" nature of news coverage in pandering to "bumper sticker" reporting.
The fact that CNN tried to further dramatize the event by playing the "cause of death unknown" card while having Dr. Drew opine on addiction made this coverage even more ridiculous.
People not getting news with proper context and perspective is a big deal. . . that's how we end up following Lady Gaga and Paris Hilton only to wake one day and realize that because of the budget cuts that we were NOT following, half of the engineering department at college X has been eliminated.
Again, is it news that a 27 year old artist died. . .YES. . .in context, should it dwarf 11,000 people dying of famine?
NO!
Labels: Death and other pleasantries
