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slaveboyforyou -> RE: What Happened to the News? (4/28/2009 12:38:30 AM)
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What you are describing is not new. Sensationalistic journalism did not start 20 years ago. It started with universal literacy in the Western world. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it is what it is. A century and a half ago, most people couldn't read. At that time, most people relied on the most educated member of their community (generally a school teacher, preacher, mayor, etc) to let them know what was going on outside their communities. Inside their communities, gossip was the main news. In the late 19th Century, universal literacy became a goal of all Western nations. What did we get from that? We got true crime, dime store novels, sensationlistic gossip columns in newspapers, etc.
Believe it or not, these kinds of things were non-existant before universal literacy. If you were a farmer in some po-dunk town in Kentucky in 1860, you weren't likely to know what the rest of the world is up to. Your news came from back-fence gossip after Sunday services.
In the latter part of the 19th Century, we had a drive to teach everyone to read. I'm not saying that's a bad thing; it certainly isn't. But it is a fact that most people aren't that smart. Most people don't care about the world outside of their small social grouping. Most people don't put a lot of thought into the world's problems. They want sensationalism, gossip, and the like. They want to be outraged, turned on, scared, etc. Sex, violence, and fear sale like hotcakes. It was true 100 years ago, and it's true today.
One of the first examples of yellow journalism causing a major historical event is the Spanish-American War. Mr. Hearst has a personal interest in the going-ons of Cuba. He was outraged to learn of the treatment of Cubanos by the Spanish. He wasn't wrong; the Spanish were extremely oppressive towards Cubans. But it wasn't a major concern for us until Hearst started publishing stories about the conditions there. The accident that occurred on the USS Maine was an oppotunity for Hearst to sway the largely literate people of the U.S. towards war. If that had happened 50 years prior, we wouldn't have had a war.
Fast forward 50 years with radio and television, and you got more people that normally wouldn't have cared about the world around them. The news is now an entertainment medium, but it didn't just pop up recently. It's been coming for over a century. We live in a small world, and that fact is becoming obvious. My words can be read by people all over the world. I can IM with someone on the other side of the world in seconds. It's a wonderful thing, but it does have negative implications.
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