Quote Originally Posted by LiamKerrington View Post
This is a very good question. But before I get down on this one, let me first focus on a small detail:

Media and news are two different things. And both have different tasks, and if not task, they both aim at different goals they try to achieve.
The News Services focus on most recent events or current questions which are or are to be discussed in the public - like for instance: guns, gun-ownership, gun-control. The News provide information about the facts on the one side, while each News Service connects the facts with a certain opinion or tendency of opinion. They do this with a couple of different types of articles and with different methods of filtering information - just reporting mere facts, commentary on matters, prolonged reports, interviews with specialists or involved people, polls, and prior to all of this: selection and prioritization of topics, nomally based on the decisions of the editor or a group of editors.

The Media has a very different approach. They don't necessarily stick with recent events on the one side. And also they are not limited to the tools of trade like the News are. The Media, actually, is much more broader then the News with the News being one part of what the Media provides as one of many different services. Other services include documentaries, talk shows with major topics, reviews of what other services of different types have discussed, movies and TV-shows; and doing all these things, that allows them to delve much deeper into any topic then what the News-Services can ever achieve. But there are a few similarities nevertheless: The Media itself governs what they want to show and how they want to get involved in certain topics, and the major decisions are again made by top-editors.
I should have clarified. When I'm saying media I'm referring to media in the broadest sense of the term: the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely. I would say that news coverage falls within the confines of that definition. We could also include news papers, blogs, lectures, etc under that umbrella.

Now, why this distinction? Simple: While I mentioned earlier that the News are very much focussed on displaying criminal and violent assaults and thus on providing only a very small fraction of what is going on in the USA, the Media does not do this. The Media provides much more different content regarding the USA - about culture, society, politics, economy, sciences, 'the land' or 'the nation' in general allowing the audience to get a much broader and thus much better, though still to some degree filtered picture about the USA; but the USA is not reduced to a gun-crazy nation, like what we receive from the News. The focus here therefore is on The News-Services and not so much on Media in general.
Can you give us some examples of strictly "News Services" and examples of average media? I'm not entirely certain that I'm clear on how you're drawing the distinction.

But this judgement about the News-Services in Germany or the EU in relation to the events taking place in the USA is only half true; because the News also provide a lot of information about current events in the USA like what the President of the USA does, what political tensions on certain matters exist, what economy does, what other natural hazards take place, what crazy or impressive sport-events happen etc. The interesting thing, though, is that the emotional impact is much bigger and harder to digest, when the News give a report about one/ few madmen shooting in a frenzy and killing many people without any cause; and here, actually, it does not even matter if any News Service does so in an opinionated way. And such News shape the opinion about the USA much stronger then any other News - which is, actually, weird. Theory: And I think this happens because the foreign audience automatically compares their tradition and situation with what - according to the News - seems to be the case in the USA; and since such violent acts have a much more personal feel to them, I think, the members of the audience feel much more touched to it - like based on a certain 'social empathy' or something ... (I hope this makes some sense, what I write here ...)

Having said all this: This does not only apply to the situation between foreign News Services and events in the USA; this seems to be true for national News and the current events within the same nation.


Therefore the question would be: Is anything wrong with the way News-Services filter news and choose the method of displaying news?

All the best!
Liam
I think you're right about the sensationalist approach to violence in the news media (clarified). It seems the easiest way to garner social empathy for a cause. I would argue that it certainly is wrong for anyone reporting facts to ignore anything that doesn't fit the headline or by line. Again, its a sensationalist approach that is so hard to stand outside of, and I think a lot of that stems from ego, personal politics, etc.

I'll about to make a broad generalization about journalism, and journalists--personal opinion, not rooted in fact:

Journalists are people, and people want acceptance and recognition. If you're a journalist, then the biggest possible pat on the back from the world is the Pulitzer. That's the ticket, man. That's what we want, we crave, and we work for. We broke that story, we roped the attention of the entire world, and focused it on one tiny suburb of one tiny town, in one small corner of one large country. You do that with a powerful story. More often than not, we rearrange, editorialize, and manipulate the story to be just that, a story.

Oh, he ran a marathon, he did it for his wife, and his kids, and kids all over the world that are disabled, and he did it without any mother-fucking legs! Oh it's a heart warming story, and on and on. It reads different than "Disabled man ran in marathon with new prosthesis." I suppose one places more emphasis on the technological advance than other. One would appeal to a different reader than the other.

Journalists are just writers, and writers story-tellers. They're definitely the facilitators of the sensationalist approach. You can turn on the nightly news, and see a variation of the theme. The anchor that is giving you the facts, is given them in a predetermined order designed by the person writing the copy that is scrolling on the prompter above the lens. I'm not sure we could ever move away from that. I would certainly like to.