After a nice relaxing day off on Monday, I came home to my dorm room and turned on the television set, expecting to see “Veritas: The Quest” on ABC—one of my favorite shows. Instead—to my dismay—the network was airing three full hours of Michael Jackson coverage.
I looked through the TV schedule and discovered NBC was also showing their own Jackson special at 10 pm. Just days after the FOX network’s announcement of “Jackson, Take Two: The Interview They Wouldn’t Show You,’’ all of the networks are now getting in on the act.
Jackson is at best a reckless, irresponsible parent and at worst a possible child molester. Whether a famous or infamous man, he really doesn’t deserve all of the incessant publicity he has been receiving as of late.
It seems that too often in this country people have to do something wrong, or disaster has to occur before we ever hear about it on the news.
The space shuttle program had achieved many successful launches and propelled myriad advances in science before the recent Columbia disaster, but we rarely ever saw coverage of that on TV.
The print media followed the stories behind the Columbine High School massacre for several months after the incident, but hardly ever report on the millions of other school children around the U.S. who actively engage in community service everyday or lead activities that contribute to the growth of their schools character and personality.
Mike Tyson has constantly been the subject of news stories for biting the ear of Evander Holyfield and raping a woman, while other athletes often don’t get the attention they deserve for visiting sick children in hospitals.
The bad events that the media presents to us each day are definitely not representative of what really goes on in our country. It is time that the media started showing a more accurate picture of the balance of our world’s happenings, not some slanted mixture of 80 percent negative and 20 percent positive.
Maybe if people were shown the world as it is rather than through some sensationalist lens, the frequency of disorders like anorexia and clinical depression would be reduced. Reality is actually much more pleasant than doom, misery, and destruction.
