News Media Ethics

News Media Machine

Friend or Foe?

When forming your opinion on something of importance, a person usually consults a trustworthy friend or mentor. You wouldn’t just let any unqualified stranger with unknown or questionable motives into your life to inform your views! But wait! everyone does exactly that. We wake up, turn on the morning news and prepare to be informed about the world around us. However does anyone ever question who it is informing us about our world and what their motives are? Who are the people behind the smiling anchormen, women and news cameras? What right or qualifications do they have to be informing us? More importantly does letting these strangers into our homes and giving them carte blanche have an untoward effects on our society?

To my mind the role of the news media is as an unofficial branch of government, one ran by the people; encouraging a transparency in politics, business and in matters of the law. Yet turning on the local news we see story after story of individual tragedy and I wonder, to what purpose? How do the countless “news” stories which leech on human emotion achieve these goals? Rather than take up the mantle as guardians of the people the media has adopted the garish role of vulture. We see recurring examples of this scavenging of humanity whenever disaster strikes; reporters and news choppers circle their hapless carrion taking their pound of flesh to provide us gruesome entertainment. With this distorted purpose, news outlets flood their viewers with heart wrenching morbidly entertaining reality television.

So what could the harm in that be you ask. I will simply be on my guard about what I am told! I am after all a sensible person. Well sensible you might be however, what if this alternate reality peddled by newsmongers begins to take on a life of it’s own? Is it fathomable that sensationalizing crime has the unwanted side effect of enticing a fame starved public towards infamy? In a culture where tweeters, bloggers, and facebookers everywhere yearn for recognition and an ever increasing list of friends, and followers, are sicker minds attracted to the infamy that clings to perpetrators of violent crimes? Maybe we as sensible people can claim that it is harmless banter and we do occasionally get a kernel of useful information; but what of the unstable minds with whom scenes of bloody and gore resonate with thoughts of fame and glory?

In the wake of the recent shooting of congresswoman Giffords scanning all the headlines and listening to all the sounds bites, a realization hit me. Not only did I now know the name of the suspected shooter but in my mind had even began to caricature his character in and effort to understand the crime. I was joined by the news media and Bloggers alike touting knowledge of the young man’s mental instability. Within hours of the crime Jared Lee Loughner was one of the most infamous men in the United States.

Though I cannot claim to be an authority on human psychology, I can however comment anecdotally on the very human need for attention that we all feel. I would put forward a hypothesis as to the media’s effect on certain violent offenders: the media attention on domestic terrorists succor the very beast it reviles on the airwaves; the consideration and sometimes adoration that these unstable individuals attract from national media coverage becomes a draw towards heinous crime. If so I would posit that the news media becomes complicit in the rise of these instances of brutal aggression.

Despite my stringent tone in my critique of the news media I do not mean that irresponsible reporting practices are at fault for all instances of violence. Nor even that they are solely responsible for any acts of violence. In fact there are many outlets of the news media that hold strictly to journalistic ethics as well as provide us with useful and entertaining information. What I mean to point out is the complicity of irresponsible unethical reporting in exacerbating a condition that already existed. In analogy the news media’s encouragement would be akin to ONE of the straws that contributed to breaking the camels back. To conclude, if we know or even suspect that giving violent offenders national media attention could be excitatory to the rate of such crimes isn’t it at the very least wrong in principle to continue such reporting practices?