Laughing in the face of danger!
The Media runs our lives, not the Dictators!
Why do we allow the media to run our lives?
We let the media run our lives because we are scared to run them ourselves. We let them scare us, we let them panic, we let them make us happy, we let them disgust us, but the one they they don’t do, is give us a choice. The UK is heavily based around its news, take the news away, and you have 61 million people without someone telling them what to do. Take away the big news papers, such as The Daily Mail, The Express, The Times, and you have half the population reading doctored news to make it easier to read. Remove the other half, and you have a bunch of intellects walking around panic buying toilet tissue because “their newspaper told them to”.
Lets take a piece of news, and see how three different news sources respond, mainly focusing on their headlines, and how they put the story across to the user. The three news sources I have picked are:
The news article which I have picked is that it is possible that sandwich ham could cause cancer. I know this is a possibly knowledgeable topic, but I am just looking at how each news source reacts, and puts their article across to the reader.
The Daily Mail says: Don’t give children ham, says cancer experts.
The BBC says: Charity seeks end to lunchbox ham.
The Daily Star says: -No Article Found-
As you can see, the Daily Mail has gone for the “we know it will kill you, so we’re going to scare you” style of headline. A lot of people read the DailyMail, and a lot of readers have children, and nearly all of them just read that article, and just ran back to their house to bin the ham, like they have just been threatened with death if they don’t.
On the other hand, the BBC has gone for the “we know what we’re talking about, and our researchers are computers” style of headline. There is no scare-tactic in the headline, but instead suggests that there may be something else involved other than cancer.
Finally, the Daily Star just chose not to publish an article…
So as you can see from just the headlines alone, we let the media decide how we’re going to react, we also let the media decide whether we like or dislike something.
| Print article | This entry was posted by KingTarquin on August 17, 2009 at 12:50 pm, and is filed under Political Madness. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
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about 1 year ago
That naturally depends on people reading the newspapers and watching the news on TV. Which is something I do not partake in very often as I stick to my own field of expertise when it comes to news…
I “know” (based on what the media says) that aspartame is bad and that sucralose is not quite as bad. I still drink Coca Cola and not cheap supermarket stuff which relies purely on sucralose – because I believe it’s a bigger crime to sell drinks that taste like crap than sell drinks containing an ingredient which is a little bit questionable (but approved by every food standards agency going!).
about 1 year ago
I’ve always preferred the BBC and The Times, The Independent or The Guardian for news. The broadsheet newspapers and the BBC veer away from sensationalism. By their very nature, tabloids are sensationalist and whatever they publish should always be taken with a pinch of salt. In fact, I’d almost go as far to say that the tablods tend to appeal to the lowest common denominator, or sometimes people that can’t be bothered to read large articles. It depends on the tabloid though, as I’m not sure that the Metro is a broadsheet, although I do read that when I’m on the Tube, as it tends to have news in digestable chunks.
I don’t find the Metro, London Lite or any of those free papers to have much in the way of sensationalism. Usually it’s the Star, Sun and Sport papers with their titillating features that tend to be sensationalist. The likes of the BBC and the Independent et al generally tend to take the “we’ve researched this, here is what you should know before drawing a conclusion”. I wouldn’t go as far to say that the media controls everyone however… I don’t watch a lot of TV, nor read a lot of papers. I do tend to read the BBC’s news site fairly frequently though.