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When reading newspaper these days, it's hard to not read about the interesting lives of celebrities, political gossip and (in my opinion) unethical use of tragedies (homicides, surprise sex, violence) for money. The latter is a bold claim, but I will get more into it. I want to raise a discussion about the news medias role in society. Should they appeal to the common interests of the people, or should they be there to maintain the intellect, political awareness and knowledge of the people? Of course, this would be economically inefficient for any newspaper, but I am aiming towards the role of the newspaper. Let's take an example: The kidnapping of Madeleine McCann. Hypothetically, let's say that the people (the potential customers) had absoluteley no interest in this case. Would the newspaper still press it? Let's take an another example: The generic murder case. Most of us can say that such cases interest us, although disgusting as they may be, they catch our attention and we want to know what there is to know about it. The news has the information, and they know we want it. Would they still press it, if we did not have any interest in the subject? This raises a question of mine: Is it ethical to use tragedies for economic purposes? I just implied that newspapers do this. I cannot say they do, but it cannot be denied that some do. In fact, I believe most newpapers do this. Building on the latter paragraph, to further support my views: This month, an 18 year old boy strangled a 15 year old girl in Norway. It's hot topic in Norway and does'nt really tell anything about society as a whole. It is just one of those cases that catches the attention of people, making them buy printed paper. Some Norwegian newspapers managed to get the name of the killer, and printed a picture of him. This picture was retrieved from his Facebook profile. This has caused turmoil in some of the more tabloid newspapers. It is worth to note that the newspapers who printed his face, concentrate highly on cases about celebrities, MTV-style journalism, gossip and fashion. (VG and Dagbladet among others) Should we demand information, or accept the intellectual collapse of the MTV-generation? clearly not a horse fucked around with this message at Nov 07, 2009 around 09:06 |
| # ? Nov 07, 2009 09:03 |
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| # ? Nov 20, 2009 23:29 |
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The question you pose is that of the ethics of profiting off of tragedy, which isn't something anyone can really answer without being a hypocrite. Everyone finds profit off of the expense of others, some are worse than others, some we just see as worse. It is easy to say nobody should make a profit off of tragedy, impossible to make any progress in stopping it from happening. We can and should stop specific ways of doing it, but we can't really stop a predatory species from acting in a predatory manner. Ethics are determined by the majority, morals by the individual. Our society has for the most part determined that media behavior such as this is ethical, as long as everyone gets to pretend they don't agree with it while still buying the poo poo out of it. Moral is self defined, if the media believes it is immoral they probably wouldn't do it, if you felt it was immoral you wouldn't read/buy it, if enough people believe it to be immoral it would stop being ethical.
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| # ? Nov 07, 2009 09:49 |
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clearly not a horse posted:Should we demand information, or accept the intellectual collapse of the MTV-generation? All you have to do is stop using/reading/watching/listening to bad news media. Check out this thread here for ideas.
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| # ? Nov 07, 2009 17:53 |
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I hate that we get so many of these threads while we live in a world with google news archives. It's trivially easy to take "the kids today" sorts of claims and empirically check if a thing is new or not.
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| # ? Nov 07, 2009 18:07 |
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First, there is a lot of good information and journalism out there. It's just not the journalism that you always find in popular news sources. Second, even though there is good news out there, it should indeed be worrying that "pop culture, gossip, and murder cases" are so prevalent on the major commercialized news outlets. This isn't because one can't find real news without some looking, but because it distracts a great majority of people from serious problems and undermines the kind of civic culture that one needs for a healthy democracy. If people are more concerned with, say, Britney Spears than with health care, that's a big problem. That said, it's not the only problem. One problem is control of the news media and its aims. Privately controlled, for-profit media corporations, especially when held by larger corporations, are less likely to report serious corporate wrong-doings, to question business-related motivations of politicians, or to generally report on the problems of an economic order in a systemic sense. I think those are important questions for a democracy. There are problems that stem from this that go beyond the whole "pop culture" issue. One is the constant need to create mini-crises and scandals in order to drive viewership or sales. That means that it's harder to hold folks accountable for their actions and to track systemic problems over the long-haul. Mini-crises and corporate interests mean that issues like inequality, poverty, declining standards of living, etc. are kept off the radar while sex scandals, Octomom, and whatever big-ticket items are kept on. Even when "real news" is reported, it usually only appears for a short period of time until it goes onto the next bit. It's a systemic problem not only with content but control and interests, and it won't be fixed until we start thinking of it in those terms.
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| # ? Nov 07, 2009 21:43 |
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I hate that we get so many of these threads while we live in a world with google news archives. It's trivially easy to take "the kids today" sorts of claims and empirically check if a thing is new or not. I did not make this thread to find trustworthy news sources. I know to find them. I made this thread to discuss the issue at hand, and put it into a social context. In my opinion, it tells us something troubling about the mentality of out kin today. How can a panty slip become breaking news? How did it come to this? I have no ability to se the issue from both sides, as I am very critical to this, and the common mentality of people troubles me. Can the for-profit exploitation of tragedies be justified? Speaking of regulations, that is a more difficult topic. I do not agree that it is right to remove the freedom of the printing press. In a free world, people get what they demand. The MTV-generation is inevitably a victiim to what I would call a intellectual collapse.
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| # ? Nov 07, 2009 22:59 |
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clearly not a horse posted:In my opinion, it tells us something troubling about the mentality of out kin today. How can a panty slip become breaking news? How did it come to this? This is what I'm saying, you have a warped view of the past. Unless you are 190 years old or something you do not actually remember what news was in the past, you just have imagination of what it was like. In the past that would be something you'd have to live with or drive somewhere to remedy, now there is no excuse. It's trivial to check Google archives and see that you are wrong and that this is not a new thing.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 01:48 |
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Like OOCC said, there is a certain defense in news in saying that yellow journalism and gossip have always been a major part of the news media. This has become even worse now that we have round the clock cable news, where there is just so much content to fill that it's hard to always have something worth watching. However, this excuse only goes so far; talking about a pantie slip is one thing, but giving it a week of headline status is just journalistic prurience.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 01:54 |
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Kaal posted:Like OOCC said, there is a certain defense in news in saying that yellow journalism and gossip have always been a major part of the news media. This has become even worse now that we have round the clock cable news, where there is just so much content to fill that it's hard to always have something worth watching. However, this excuse only goes so far; talking about a pantie slip is one thing, but giving it a week of headline status is just journalistic prurience. I think it got worse from a perspective that there is more news. So a pantie slip will get 48 hours of cumulative coverage. But at the same time actually do go back and read old news papers, many are free online, it's weird to see that there was a huge amount of time that is what people thought news WAS. A lot of old papers had a story or two, but then it's not like they were getting satellite feeds from all over the world so they'd be a few pages of real news then a hilarious amount of nonsense. A hilarious one is how certain 1800s papers editorialized on OBITUARIES, someone dies and you get a crazy rear end little story about it, like how they slept with a black man and thus died, or a weird description of how burnt up they looked after a fire.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 05:25 |
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Kaal posted:Like OOCC said, there is a certain defense in news in saying that yellow journalism and gossip have always been a major part of the news media. This has become even worse now that we have round the clock cable news, where there is just so much content to fill that it's hard to always have something worth watching. However, this excuse only goes so far; talking about a pantie slip is one thing, but giving it a week of headline status is just journalistic prurience. The only reason those weren't done back in the grand old days of yellow journalism was that Victorian undergarments and cameras didn't lend themselves to it. There's no way to have modern technology and not have people use it for gossip and panty shots. It's human instinct.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 05:36 |
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madprocess posted:The only reason those weren't done back in the grand old days of yellow journalism was that Victorian undergarments and cameras didn't lend themselves to it. Beyond that, is he 120 years old? does he remember that they didn't? what is he basing the idea that they never did anything like that on? idealized 'memory' of what he heard or imagines it was like? A trillion miles from a scientific study but here is the timeline for appearances of 'underwear showing" in the news: 
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 05:43 |
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clearly not a horse posted:This raises a question of mine: Is it ethical to use tragedies for economic purposes? I just implied that newspapers do this. I cannot say they do, but it cannot be denied that some do. In fact, I believe most newpapers do this. Yes it is. Who else profits from tragedies? - Doctors - Insurance agencies - Police officers - Firemen - Safety equipment manufacturers - Regulators - Comedians - People in need of organ transplants And so on. Now there is irresponsible reporting (and doctors, insurance agents, or police) out there, but the very best of journalism uplifts, examines, and works to improve society. Tragedies also include everything from the My Lai massacre to pointing out birth defects from contaminated water supplies. Even things as sensational as the Ft Hood base shootings are important news. People need to know these things, even if some fringe elements shout about conspiracies and don't check sources. And you don't get the cream of the crop without the curds. You can't legislate away "bad journalism" (especially since you drat internet kiddos won't pay a buck for it and insist that everything has to be free and ad supported.. I'm kidding). Just pick the good sources and try to encourage other people to do the same. I recommend the New York Times as an independent institution with high journalistic standards--but there are a lot of other choices too. EDIT: To go off your examples on murder reporting, keep in mind that people have a right to know what happens in their neighborhood, and that individual cases be completely unknown without a newspaper reporting the police blotter. And sometimes it adds up to stuff--for example, this excellent map of NY: http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homicides/map j4on fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 09:32 |
| # ? Nov 08, 2009 09:26 |
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:But at the same time actually do go back and read old news papers, many are free online, it's weird to see that there was a huge amount of time that is what people thought news WAS. A lot of old papers had a story or two, but then it's not like they were getting satellite feeds from all over the world so they'd be a few pages of real news then a hilarious amount of nonsense. A hilarious one is how certain 1800s papers editorialized on OBITUARIES, someone dies and you get a crazy rear end little story about it, like how they slept with a black man and thus died, or a weird description of how burnt up they looked after a fire. DING DING DING OOCC hits it on the head. Before you credit the old newsmedia for its focus on "serious news," you have to remember that a lot of what was considered "serious news" was as much tripe/nonsense as Lindsay Lohan's cooter. Here's some examples of a whole genre of "serious news" we don't have today, the investigation of racial mythology  inset:  This story is from World War II, it basically says Emperor Hirohito likes to praise the sayings of Abraham Lincoln a lot, but when they took an actual Japanese man and gave him a basic American civics test he failed miserably, couldn't spell the names of any of the states correctly, etc. (obviously, he doesn't speak any more than a child's understanding of English, but the point is to say that Hirohito is lying because the average Japanese is too stupid to have a real appreciation of American history/civics)  This article is how Americans in a patriotic anti-Japanese fervor ended up beating up a Chinese national on the West Coast, and its a guide to identifying who is Japanese/Chinese so you don't end up arguing with/summarily beating up the wrong race of people:  This is from an article talking about race/caste hierarchy in Brazil and how their definitions of black, white, mulatto etc. don't match up with ours:  It's not just "yellow journalism" or fake stories that were bad/banal/insipid in the past, a great deal of the real, award-winning, legitimate sources that upheld good conduct, good rules of ethics, actual investigative reporting, etc. were full of crud like this. None of these are from some Deep South metropolitan broadsheet or anything, they are all from LIFE Magazine, one of the top popular/respected newsmagazines in the United States in the middle of the 20th Century. None of these stories has any merit but they were seriously investigated by real reporters/photojournalists and presented as real news, so just keep that in mind. Tape Speed fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 17:24 |
| # ? Nov 08, 2009 17:18 |
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Tape Speed posted:This story is from World War II, it basically says Emperor Hirohito likes to praise the sayings of Abraham Lincoln a lot, but when they took an actual Japanese man and gave him a basic American civics test he failed miserably, couldn't spell the names of any of the states correctly, etc. (obviously, he doesn't speak any more than a child's understanding of English, but the point is to say that Hirohito is lying because the average Japanese is too stupid to have a real appreciation of American history/civics) West Vasina, Sootadkor, and Jhogeye. Yes, that's perfect. Most people have no real idea what things like the news were even like when they were children, and stuff from before they were born may as well have been on another planet.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 22:51 |
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perianwyr posted:Most people have no real idea what things like the news were even like when they were children, and stuff from before they were born may as well have been on another planet. And beyond that any exposure you get to 50 year old news will be primarily news stories that were of a quality that someone felt the need to preserve it for 50 years. Few will read or understand gossip thats 50 years old. I mean just going with a star that was big enough I actually know who they are and a casual search about "news" about her and I'm sticking mostly to the 1950s because the 1950s is the fantasy land pure time in basically every person's imagination when they are talking about how great things used to be: -Marilyn Monroe crossed her shapely legs for the first time in Britain today--and started a mild panic. -Actress Marilyn Monroe paid a traffic fine in Beverly Hills Municipal Court yesterday, but don't think for a minute that's all there was to it -Marilyn Monroe? Not So Bad, Soviet Farmer Says. "She's not so bad!" said Boris Savelev of the Soviet farm delegation tonight -LONDON, Wednesday, July 25 (AP)--The Daily Express said today that Marilyn Monroe is studying to become a convert to the Jewish religion. -Marilyn Monroe, disguised in a black wig and wearing a black hood, is having the time of her life as she commutes between Connecticut, where she's visiting the Milton Greenes, and Manhattan -Screen Star Marilyn Monroe said today she was "really very hurt" because the U.S. Army banned a picture of her posing in a low-cut dress -Two men accused of using famous screen beauties' names in come-on letters in a nude-picture sales racket today will be confronted by Actress Marilyn Monroe. HARD HITTING SERIOUS NEWS.
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| # ? Nov 08, 2009 23:18 |
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Here's what I learned from a decade spent as a print journalist: Murders are news and people want to read about them. This has been a constant in most cultures for a very long time.
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| # ? Nov 09, 2009 11:52 |
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Tape Speed posted:
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| # ? Nov 09, 2009 12:06 |
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Gawker sometimes does a rather nice overview of how different papers are treating their news. The Ft. Hood shooting. http://gawker.com/5400175/the-day-t...ame-in/gallery/ More. http://gawker.com/tag/frontpages/ If nothing else, it's an excellent way to figure out what national of paper appeals to you.
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| # ? Nov 10, 2009 06:34 |
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