Sensational

As a freshman and sophomore, I spent very little time in my dorm room, but my tv was always on. With the exception of the semester that I had a roommate hooked on BET, CNN was always on. They said generally the same 15 minutes of news repeatedly all day long. There was also the scrolling update bar on the bottom that I could focus on if they were saying something that I had already heard. At the time it was the perfect way for me to get my news. I could pickup a story or two in between classes, or I could quickly get a full update after dinner.

After I moved off campus, it became easier to drive to campus during an NPR hourly update. When I moved back on to campus, I didn't go back to CNN. I spent a couple months trying to keep up with the news online, but I have to admit, I prefer to have someone else package it up and get it ready for me. When the hubby bought me an ipod everything became perfect again. I have several NPR shows set to automatically download and I enjoy listening to them at my leisure (often while I knit).

This past week without internet in my residence hall left me without NPR podcasts, so I sought out an old friend in CNN. It is different now. The format is generally the same, but the content is now (outrageously) sensational. I should have noticed this when I watched it in Kentucky. I remember feeling uncomfortable with it, but the major news story at the time was the trapped miners and I had convinced myself that they were just doing a poor job of trying to continue conveying the urgency of the situation (as days passed by with no news). I was making unwarranted excuses for them.

I've always been sensitive to biases in my news sources, and I've been taught that sensationalizing is a way of being biased. This was different though. People or topics weren't sensationalized. The whole presentation was just at a different level than I remember. It felt like a used car commercial not a news story. It had reached the point of insulting. Whether it was more insulting to the viewer or the subject of the story is debatable, but either way, I was disappointed.


A related anecdote that I don't have a proper transition for:
In Europe, I watched a lot of British news. While I was in Spain, Paris Hilton was going in and out of jail. One evening the newscaster began her story of Paris being released (the first time), and her co-anchor stopped her and asked, "Why are we reporting on this?" She didn't fully shrug her shoulders, but her body language became clearly unimpressed and slightly annoyed, and she answered, "Because this is all that they are talking about in the US." While we were making fun of Paris for going to jail, the rest of the world was making fun of us for caring.