Bleeding Leads to major Turn-offs
Crime is big--crime against the innocent even bigger. If there's a sexual angle, it will be there as explicitly as the TV people dare to say it, pretending their disgust on each successive newscast. And since people are fascinated with fire, photographers shoot lots of fire and news producers would run all they could get at the top of the show. They'd throw out the day's stories and throw their whole staff at a big fire for "team coverage" of any fire which still had big flames when the news crews go to the scene. That it might be an abandoned old warehouse doesn't matter. Viewers are drawn to spectacle and that makes yellow flames the lead story.
--"Local TV news is completely ratings driven," Greg Byron, broadcast Journalist
I really do have to agree with everything Byron said in this essay. Ratings destroyed broadcast journalism. As for "if it bleeds, it leads," I can honestly say that one of the biggest turn-offs from Tv news for me has always been the amount of troubling and "dangerous" news on each episode. In fact, I can recall several arguments I've gotten into with my parents over this same subject. Dad always gave me a hard time for not watching the news, but I always had the same argument, "why would I want to watch something that just makes me depressed? That's what my chick flicks are for..." They fill an entire news segment with tales of travesty and woe, strategically placing a few heart-warming (and sometimes humorous) stories in between to make sure the public isn't completely brainwashed into thinking that the whole world is a ticking bomb just waiting to go off.
While reading this essay, I thought back to the beginning of my junior year of high school, when wonderful Hempfield Area's teachers went on strike, demanding raises or at least compromises from our dutiful school board. Of course, this made it into the news, but if I recall correctly, the news crew was more interested in the protesters outside of my high school than they were about the actual strike. And, because I live right down the road from Hempfield, my neighbors and I always walked to school, and boy, those reporters couldn't wait to interview us as we walked along side the road...thinking back, I think they just asked us what we thought of the whole strike thing, and I remember getting so excited because I was a journalist for my school paper. I gave the reporter some long story about how I was worried that the strike would mess up my school schedule for preparing for AP exams. Needless to say, my quote wasn't exactly what they were looking for, so they used my neighbor's quote instead...I think he said something about wishing the strike would just be over. I'm not bitter or anything--I understand that they needed to use the quote that made the story, but even then, I wondered why they would use his quote over mine...
I guess the whole point I'm trying to make here is that it's a shame that tv news has come to this. It has so much potential, but instead it worries more about ratings than about reporting news. In a way, I feel like broadcast journalists give the rest of us journalists a bad name--I mean, I get that they're just trying to make a living like the rest of us, but how can you call yourself a real journalist when you fabricate your stories' teasers just to make your viewers more eager to watch more of your attempt at producing quality news?
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