"Still no leads in the search for Chandra Levy."
This is news?
Maybe I was just paying more attention to the news this summer, but it seems like almost every big story in the last four months has been some little incident that’s been blown out of proportion.
Having worked in the news section of The Poly since I was a freshman, these stories really started to annoy me. "The Summer of the Shark" didn’t see many more shark bites than recent years, but because the news media picked up on the story, it became national news.
I was all ready to write a notebook lambasting the national news media for blatant sensationalism, but it got me thinking about why it happens.
Upon reflection, it’s not entirely the news media’s fault. It’s a problem that stems from increased bandwidth. There’s an old adage in the newspaper industry: It’s not all the news that’s fit to print, it’s all the news that fits.
Fortunately for The Poly, we only have a limited number of pages to fill once a week. But daily newspapers, 24-hour television news programs, and Internet news sources have an enormous and ever-increasing amount of space to fill.
Television programs have it the worst. Unlike text news sources, which can include large amounts of less important information that might not get read, television programs have to keep each story short in order to keep the viewer’s attention. Less interesting stories must be shorter and do a poorer job of filling that impressive bandwidth.
When the public responded to that first shark attack, news media figured out that the public was interested in shark attack stories. They were then less likely to pass over further stories that surfaced. Sidebars were put together. More research was done. Whatever there was that could be used to fill the bandwidth was collected, formatted, and beamed to the masses.
Let’s not forget, these media organizations are in business to make money. The search for Chandra Levy and the private details of Rep. Gary Condit’s life may not have deserved as much coverage they got, but the story boosted ratings. Higher ratings mean more ad revenue. That’s capitalism, folks.
As I’m not about to call for the downfall of the free economy, I guess I’ll just have to sift through the colossal amount of news that’s made available to me and find the legitimate stories for myself.
