So "The Ring" was on TV Friday night while my roomates and I were getting ready to go out. We got sucked in pretty quickly and ended up watching the whole thing. The last thing on my mind was Journalism or our blog assingment, but a quote from the creepy killer ring girl's father quickly brought it to mind.
When Naomi Watt's character (who is a journalist) brought up the suicide of his wife and his crazy daughter, the father says
"What is it with reporters? You take one person's tragedy and force the worldThat quote not only had me running to get some pen and paper to write it down, but it reminded me of the countless stories and polls we've seen in our classes about readers beleiving we are too biased or too negative, ect.
to experience it... spread it like sickness."
I decided to look at the headlines for The News Gazette, The New York Tiimes and U.S.A. Today on this past Friday. Here's some of the headlines on the front page of each:
USA TODAY: "Bailout pushes mortgage rates up", "Sports also paying a price amid the struggling economy", and "Police agencies fear more crime caused by financial meltdown".
NEW YORK TIMES: "Oil price drops, aiding economy and consumers", "In a downturn, college straings family budgets", "Rivals' visions differ on unleasing innovation" and "Courts compound pain of China's tainted milk".
NEWS GAZETTE (from 16th): "Appeals court: Closed session was OK", "Economy takes turn back toward basement", "time to get personal" (about debate) and "recession now coudl evoke that of late '70s".
*** Now this might be a little unfair since we are in a huge economic crisis right now so it is going to reported on quite a bit but the number of negative headlines compared to positive headlines in each newspaper is quite drastic and common no matter what is happening in our economy at the moment. By just looking at the front page of each newspaper in the morning, one could only conclude that our lives suck. As a side note, have you noticed that local papers usually have more "happy" headlines than national papers? I wonder why?
Negative stories sell. People want to hear about the murder in Florida or the kipnapping in Chicago. In the movie, the people wanted to know about the wife's suicide and their creepy daughter. But it is our job as reporters and editors to decide what IS news and what is just sensationalism. Those two lines get crossed more in news than they should, and by looking at the polls from readers: people notice.
So before this becomes a essay instead of a blog, I'll just leave you with a couple of questions. Do you think we should edit for how much negativity we are putting in a paper? Is good news hardly ever news? Why do we seem to focus on the negative?
2 comments:
I really liked this topic. I think it goes along with the whole ethics of journalism subject. Is it ethical to just report negative news in order to get people to read it? Probably not, along with constructing headlines to make stories more interesting.
Also, your questions about good news ever being real news, another good one. I'd say good news is news, even though it may seem boring or redundant. However, if you asked me to tell you about something good that happened in the news, I'd have a much harder time then telling you something negative.
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