The media, and the importance of news stories.

Toshiya

Toshiya

I'm on another planet with you
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So over the past couple of days in the UK, the news over here has divided its time to 3 main news stories.
- Amy Winehouse found dead in her flat
- 92 dead in Norway at the hands of some right-wing extremist
- Bullet train accident kills people in China.

There's been a lot of uproar (on my facebook, at least) about the amount of coverage going to Amy Winehouse's death, whilst the other two (which by a lot of people are considered to be much worse tragedies) are not being reported on now.
For those of you that aren't from the UK that may not know who Amy Winehouse is, she was a 27-year-old female singer who lived in Camden, London. She was famous for a couple of her songs in particular and for a long time she'd been in the news for drugs and drink problems. At her last concert, she went onto the stage far too drunk to perform and then cancelled the rest of her dates. She died of a suspected drugs overdose.

Now, I'm not saying that her death isn't tragic - I didn't like her at all but I didn't wish her dead. However, I find it awful that the media over here is dedicated 80% of its news time to her, rather than the events in Norway and China, both of which killed many more (all innocent) people. In the paper today, a couple of people were even quoted as saying they didn't expect Amy Winehouse to last long - a fair statement considering her history. So why does the news have to drag the story out? There wasn't even any suspicion behind it - she's been on drugs and in a bad way for a long time. Eventually, she went too far - for me, that's the end of the story.

What happened in Norway is a national disaster, and what happened in China is pretty bad too. However, now that one of our celebrities - and a celebrity not often known for good things - has died, our media no longer cares about the disasters, but only about the fact that a woman on drugs has (surprisingly) died from a drugs OD.

Basically I just wanted your thoughts on whether you think the media in your country needs to sort its priorities out. I don't want arguments over whether Amy Winehouse deserved it or anything like that - I just chose to use the recent events as an example.

Fire away.
 
they report what sells. and dead junkie popstars sell more than dead norwegians. whats more is that we'll probably get a report somewhere down the line that x amount of news papers hired a private investigator to find out what happened to her. assuming her daddy doesnt sell the story to the press - which he probably will.

this is the world we live in. sad.
 
I think one of the main challenges the press face isn't so much the integrity or relevance of their stories but how many ratings they'll attract. It's understandably difficult finding stories worth reading about on a day to day basis and the vast majority of what can be reported on in Norway has been reported on really. I mean it's a tragedy yes but they've given us the figures, the suspect, his background, the visits by key figures there and the sentiment of other nations so theres not much more to report on that people are going to want to hear.

Part of what makes the Winehouse story so big is because we live in a world obsessed with celebrity. If a celebrity dies it becomes a bigger deal than say... the famine in Somalia that barely anyone is reporting. This is because deep down we as a society care about and discuss the goings on of celebrities before we give two craps about nobodies dying somewhere - quite frankly. We love to throw our two cents in, especially when there are tragic elements to a celebrity's death.
 
I don't think I have heard any coverage of the Amy Winehouse story on any of our terrestrial channels. They seem to be pretty focussed on the Norwegian story on all of them, and I haven't heard of the Chinese story tbh.

Like Harley said though, there is only so much actual facts they can give us on the serious news stories. Well this kind of celebrity story allows much more conjecture and speculation. People will gossip about Winehouse, no one could gossip about a mass murder.

I agree totally though, it is a horrible shame that that's the way of things
 
Ah, but Conor, you're from Ireland aren't you? I thought it'd be a bit different in other European countries, and so it should be.
All English news channels have been talking about is Winehouse. Thing is, there's only so much you can say about Winehouse - she died from a drug overdose. That's literally all there is to it. With the Norwegian thing nobody really knows why the guy did it, and there are still people missing - there are actually developments in the report that should be aired on the news.

I agree with the ratings thing though, that's all news channels and papers care about, ratings and amount of sales. Although judging by the amount of groups, polls and statuses I've seen on facebook, more people want to hear about the Norwegian bombing and shootings than Amy Winehouse - I think they'd get ratings by reporting on Norway too. It's ridiculous.
 
Ok I actually live in China at the moment and can comment on personal feelings from this side of the world. Regarding the bullet train incident.

First of all the media is very important, especially in China where the government has so much power.

Second of all people are rioting, yelling, and are severely upset with the government rigt now. This is the second time this year the peoples republic had "accidently" killed people. There was another situation where they bulldozed a building full of residents who refused to leave.

The thing is China is craving their own technology, and advancments, as opposed to relying on other countries, and are trying to be as independent as possible as far as their own needs.

This results in the rushing of technology, before its fully tested and operated. They had problems with the bullet train that went north on several occasions and did nothing about it.

The government puts a lot of blame on the weather, but it is NO excuse. A technology that powerful must be tested for every aspect, they cannot rely on the rain not to fall.

The incident reports 30 people died instantly, leaving another 200 in the hospitol. It is a horrible thing, and what makes it worse is that it is not an incident born out of hate or terrorism, but rather neglection of details and indifference towards human lives when trying to excell.

There is nobody to blame except the government, this technology was founded, built and invested by them.

The people of China are on the edge of a knife right now. There are way more qualified people to run the republic than those who currently do. The people now demand punishment for those responsible, and its only a matter of time before people start getting arrested.

The people talk of revolution a lot. Not for a different government, but rather different people to represent the government. I think the media is of vital importance to the people of China.
 
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Celebrity stories just sell well, particularly with the strong presence of celebrity obsession nowadays that practically keep the tabloid newspapers afloat. Add to the fact that as Winehouse was primarily a major domestic figure, it comes to no surprise that this story in the UK is garnering this much coverage. With the attacks in Oslo and the bullet train tragedy in China, they're sadly and ultimately not events that affect the UK that much, if at all. I don't like generalising, but I'll go ahead and do it anyway - the typical kind of - say - Daily Star reader would rather read up on a major celebrity death like this than the deaths of others across the North Sea or across half the world.

I have seen The Sun's front page a couple of days ago giving extensive coverage to the events in Norway, and that was chiefly because they thought at first it was the work of al-Qaeda, which has since been a hasty conclusion that has been largely discredited. I don't know how much coverage the paper has given since because obviously I don't read the paper (and the manner of the coverage), but it's enough evidence to tell me that by jumping to blame Islam, they were seeking to shift more of their papers to the general portion of the readership that would like to see such things.
 
Sounds like the media to me. They want to report on what people think is juicy. And people kill and drool over celeberties. It's like here in the U.S. when Anna Nicole Smith dies. People were pouring stories over it for weeks and ignoring everything else. But celeberities have much power because people love them. For example, Anderson Cooper pointed out that there is a war in Iraq going on and that people need to let Smith's death go and focus on more important things. There was such a negative uproar from the American people about what he said that his entire next show was dedicated to Anna Nicole Smith and her life.

Kinda silly if you ask me. Not person's death, but the fact that someone has the balls to say that something else might be important and the public beats him down for it. Just because something sounds cruel doesn't mean that it is not true. I've always had the thought that the general public are idiots. And by drowning the air waves with a celeberty's death over the deaths of many at the hands of a madman(Norway) is a perfect example of that.
 
The thing is, Winehouse's death doesn't affect us much anyway. Most of the coverage now (certainly what I saw about 2 minutes ago on the news) is people trying to make excuses for her, or people 'paying tribute' to her.
I still think it's a bit insane, how about we 'pay tribute' to the dead Norwegians too, or the Chinese. The events abroad may not affect our lives, but Winehouse's death hasn't either. I don't feel any different now than I did yesterday. She hadn't been in the news for ages because presumably people had stopped caring about the fact that she had an ongoing drug problem - then suddenly, she's dead, and she's more famous than she ever had been.
-__-
 
Yet the media is succesful in grabbing our attention.

This is the very first time I have heard a non chinese mention the bullet train incident on the forums, and I heard about Winehouse like 4 times before this.

The media is good and bad, of course its sometimes shameful, but thats the way it is, and the way its going to stay. Its much better for us to decide how to read between the lines and lies, then to be told absolutely nothing at all.

Even in this thread we are not really talking about the incidents, but rather made a thread to discuss the medie before one on the events was even created. People love dirty laundry, many of those people say they hate it, but like Don Henley said, give us dirty laundry.
 
Actually even when the media is reporting on serious tragedies they are starting to get more and more sensationalist. For example did you see Sky's coverage of the Japan disaster? They had adverts that made the entire thing look like a trailer for an apocalypse film

They literally had scenes of devastation fade to black, and then an ominous bang between each one, it was disgusting
 
Licky said:
Actually even when the media is reporting on serious tragedies they are starting to get more and more sensationalist. For example did you see Sky's coverage of the Japan disaster? They had adverts that made the entire thing look like a trailer for an apocalypse film

They literally had scenes of devastation fade to black, and then an ominous bang between each one, it was disgusting
Click to expand...

This.
Everything is sensationalised just for ratings. Thing is, I and many other people would prefer news that was straight to the point instead of sensationalised. I'd prefer a report that just said, Amy Winehouse is dead due to a drugs OD, instead of, she's dead, blah blah blah, there have been loads of tributes, etc etc etc.
Straight to the point with updates is good, dragging a news story out to improve amount of views is just plain annoying and normally insensitive.
Trashy papers do it too, like the star and the sun, it's all celebrity stuff and making disasters seem like exciting events. They're not exciting, they're tragic.
It just winds me up :sad3:
 
Toshiya said:
This.
Everything is sensationalised just for ratings. Thing is, I and many other people would prefer news that was straight to the point instead of sensationalised. I'd prefer a report that just said, Amy Winehouse is dead due to a drugs OD, instead of, she's dead, blah blah blah, there have been loads of tributes, etc etc etc.
Straight to the point with updates is good, dragging a news story out to improve amount of views is just plain annoying and normally insensitive.
Trashy papers do it too, like the star and the sun, it's all celebrity stuff and making disasters seem like exciting events. They're not exciting, they're tragic.
It just winds me up :sad3:
Click to expand...


Here is the thing. When one small popular drug addicted human is dead, its ok to sensationalise it, because she was popular ^^

The point I am making is that its a lot harder to sesantionalise tradegy, because there are so many different groups of people that could be offended if you swing to much on any specific viewpoint, in result whatever news station is putting it on could be considered biast or blashmaphy, if they dig deep enough. So its just easier, to take one person we know and throw blame at them, and harder to throw blame towards a country, religion, race, or government. The lame media are the ones getting this crap, because there is not enough bold media.

I however prefer my news sensationalised because unlike a lot of people, if something gets blown out of porportion at a certain viewpoint, I will do research on what the other sides think.

If everything was straight to the point, the end... I would have to do double the research, especially when it comes to world politics news.
 
The media needs to get it's priorities right. Telling the public what it needs to know and what it wants to know are two entirely different things, and the media lean almost exclusively towards the latter after the initial event.

The over-dramatization of events, and the way in which they are just discarded afterwards, is something that annoys me to no end as well. Let's take the series of events in Japan as an example. I lost count of the number of times I saw exactly the same footage on the first day, it was just ridiculous. How many newspapers talk about it now? When was the last time the state of Japan was even mentioned? They just move from event to event. Give it a week and the events going on in Ethiopia right now will be a distant memory for the public. Yes, I understand that is what news is, but isn't the aftermath of these events equally important? Don't the public need to know that people are suffering after the time that these events are reported? It's no wonder the celebrity culture today is so ridiculously exaggerated, because these people are the only constant thing in the news. The way the news just brushes off all these disasters and murders as "old news" and fails to keep the public informed of what is going on is, in my opinion, the worst thing about the media today. It turns tragedy into a statistic. It makes the public aware of what is going on in the world, but it fails to make them truly aware of the full extent of the events, by over-dramatizing them like a bad American disaster movie and then just ignoring them entirely as if they never occured in the first place. Just because it doesn't sell papers.

As it is now, the media represents and encourages everything that is wrong with society. It turns major, damaging world events into a soap opera, with a recurring cast of a bunch of celebrities who occasionally wash their socks incorrectly or something equally trivial that, whilst people might be amusedly interested in, they don't really need to be aware of. It's absolutely bloody ridiculous.
 
Exactly Martel.
Ideally for me, the news would give you UPDATES on things, not repeat the same thing over and over again. Or forget something as soon as the original shock of it is over. You raised a good point about the Japan earthquake - they're still feeling the aftermath of that and we get no updates on that.
Again you could say 'it doesn't affect us, why do we need to know' but how much of it really affects us? Are we affected when a celeb dies? I know I'm not.
Basically, I wish the news would tell us things that we might need to know and that might affect people, instead of just shoving celeb or sensationalised rubbish down our throats :gonk:
 
I think that Amy Winehouse was more popular than 92 people combined in Norway. The people in Norway were regular citizens and I bet most of us can't name even one of them. Amy Winehouse was a performing artist and more people knew of her than 92 dead people.

The news isn't there to make a prioritised list of things that people should hear; it reports on popular topics that people want to hear (or at least mainstream news does, anyway - that's why it's mainstream).

I'm not saying Amy was more important than the other 92 dead in Norway, but I am saying more people want to hear how she died (since it's still suspicious) than hearing, again and again, that 92 people died in Norway.

There's probably also some contribution from the fact that China and Norway aren't on our doorstep but Amy's house is just down the road. Again, we want to hear more about her.
 
The only thing that surprises me about any of this is that people still watch the news on TV, listen to it on the radio, or read it in a newspaper. You all have computers and an internet connection - why the hell are you getting shitty news that way? If you want to stay informed on anything you have to actively look.

The news has been rubbish forever, with few exceptions. It's either sensationalist or otherwise compromised by corporate or governmental interests/censorship (or completely run by the government).
 
Maybe if any of those Norwegians had made albums that people had bought people would care more. What impact have these Norwegians had upon me? None, I have none of their songs on my Ipod. I do have Amy Winehouse's two albums on my Ipod. It's not as if it was unexepected either, some batshit insane cunt shoots a lot of people, that's a fairly common news story. Alcoholic druggie Amy Winehouse dies, that's not exactly unexepected. Perhaps if it was Cliff Richard who died after shooting up a shitload of heroin then people would be amazed. When Pete Doherty vomits up his pelvis and dies after an overdose of the synthetic drug called cake people won't be surprised either. I don't think the newspaper etc were exactly ready for her death, but I don't think they had absolutely no idea at all that she might die young. And it is far easier to get some famous cunts to pay tribute to her than it is to find out about some weirdo Scandinavian who went and shot a whole bunch of people.
And it's hardly shocking news that the media is biased, according to Bono 1 billion Africans starved to death today. The only time you hear about all these poor starving Africans is when Bono is releasing the greatest hits of U2, length 0 minutes and 0 seconds. Or when the Boomtown Rats are reforming to play at a series of libraries in Panama.
 
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