Honestly, I’ve never been big on reading newspapers until a couple of months ago. I hated flipping through a newspaper back in El Salvador and only reading tragedies: gang members kill an innocent boy, women get’s raped and shoot, floods destroyed million of houses. It made me upset just to see the front cover; I was overwhelmed by the news, so I preferred to ignore it. But in reality bad news sells and makes headlines. Good news does not sell, because good news is boring and generally speaking good things happen every day but the unusual which is bad news every so often.
It’s the media’s duty to report on what is going on in society, by taking an important event and creating a story, which is newsworthy for the public. They have to tell us what’s going on, not to tell us something that is not happening. Let’s say for instance, there’s a fire in a community and all the house burn down expect for one. Yeah, the news is the fire, but the house that burns down is what makes the story not the house that is still standing.
When covering a news story journalists have to decide which elements of the event to include or exclude in the story. It’s there job to organize and select certain characteristics, properties and aspects of an event that would make headlines. If the reporter would have concentrated on the one house that still standing, the story would not make headlines. People want to read drama behind an event which is usually something bad.
Good news should have equal importance than bad news. In the case of the fire, the media should cover both side of the story; out of a terrible fire at least one house is still standing. There you mention the bad news but made it into a good news. Reporters now days, make the opposite out of a goods news they make a bad news.
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2 comments:
Did you ever hear of the phrase, "If it bleeds, it leads" ?
Sad, but true...a murder story is more likely to be put on the front page of a newspaper rather than a person's survival of a horrible disease because humans seem to be fascinated more with death and bad news than anything...it's interesting, isn't it?
I agree with what you said in this post. Bad news definitely sells better than good news unfortunately. I do think that they should cover both sides of the story though because sometimes the bad news does turn the readers away if there is no hope with a light at the end of the tunnel in the article.
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