Running across a tweet in Twitter today, I found that someone had the same questions as I do regarding the media. Chris Cuomo tweeted " ChrisCuomo Is media wrong to cater to obvious interest in royal wedding? When media covers "real issues" audience often drops...so who is to "blame"?"
I don't really have the answers to his questions, but I often wonder why a television show is interrupted for "breaking news" that Prince William proposed to Kate Middleton when there is so much more going on in the world. I often have the same questions as to why people enjoy soft news so much more than the hard news like the Haiti Cholera outbreak. How many people reading this know about the cholera outbreak rather than the Royal Family's new engagement?
I believe that the journalists choose to report on more soft news because they feel it is more newsworthy based on the attention span of Americans and others in the world. The sensationalized stories appeal to the eye of more people because it is interesting and catches their attention. I tend to like those stories as well, but it seems as though there should be more balance in the reporting of news.
According to the Mass Media and Audience powerpoint from class, there has been an information explosion from the new media and people tend to pay attention to more stories that are not so complex.
I think we are all doing a bit of soul searching as to what are priorities are and what our priorities should be. We then project this cognitive dissonance onto the media and blame them for not adequately policing what we choose to find interesting. We have created another reason to shoot the messenger.
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