Editor-in-Chief
When you log onto your favorite news site or turn on your preferred 24-hour news network, you find anything but the news. Rather than information about the breaking news story of the day, you instead hear opinion and speculation. If you look to Fox News for coverage of a shooting, you are met with unhinged nitwits warning you that your guns are going to be taken away. If you look to MSNBC for coverage of the same event you see the same concept, but this time disseminating the idea that guns are evil. People look to the news for facts, but only receive propaganda that the network overseers wish to program into as many brains as they can get to watch the screen.
Once
the rush to cater to special interest group subsides, there is over-analysis and
speculation. Every second of the event, mostly irrelevant, is discussed and
scrutinized. Guesses as to what occurred replace the facts of what actually
occurred. To top it all off, you can enjoy watching every media outlet imaginable
beating a dead horse for weeks, milking every last bit of speculation they can
muster about the event they are covering until it either ends or eventually
becomes irrelevant. This is seen in the case of the now infamous disappearance
of Flight 370 and the constant news coverage it received for months despite a
complete lack of any reportable changes in the story.
Even
with a 24-hour news cycle that requires constant updating and tracking of
events, the news media should still only be concerned with reporting the facts,
free of political bias or speculation. Rather than devoting around-the-clock
coverage to one story, the media needs to get the facts out and move on. On a
more serious note, this kind of constant coverage is detrimental and can lead
to copycat crimes in certain situations such as the coverage of a shooting
spree. On the topic of the portrayal of mass shootings in the news, forensic
psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz said, “If you don’t want to propagate mass murder…
don’t give it 24/7 coverage.” This kind of coverage even gives the perpetrator
a status of a sort of anti-hero given celebrity-like attention, such as with
the recent case of Elliot Rodger. Therefore, this kind of news coverage
complete with bias, opinion, speculation, and over-analysis must be reversed.
