4. News media has become a form of entertainment

Learning the techniques of persuasion opened my eyes up to all the times I’m consuming media that’s content has been edited to present only one side. Personally I am most susceptible to advertisements when they use music. As much as I hate to admit it when a sad song comes on during a slide show of heartbreaking photos I can’t help but donate money or buy that product. Lately I’ve been watching more of the nightly news and I have noticed a big difference between the news I grew up watching late night with my dad, and the infotainment that I now get from Fox, ABC, and MSNBC.
The stories that we covered in the project censored unit of the class will never reach the mainstream news media no matter how important the story is. Families do not want to sit around their dinner tables watching an in-depth news story about water privatization in South America (66), civil rights violations in Africa (134), or prescription drugs being peddled to under age consumers (107). After working all day no one wants to come home to a depressing hard to understand news story.
As Postman discussed in The Age of Show Business (pg 87) television turns everything in to entertainment. The problem isn’t that television presents entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter on television is presented as entertaining, which is the root of all this trouble. This entertainment aspect has spilled over into the news media. I firmly believe that in order to make the nightly news cast one needs to have a glitzy or gory story. The public doesn’t want to watch news that isn’t entertaining. In fact they don’t want to watch news at all they want to be entertained.

I choose this clip because I felt like the panel, specifically Janeane Garofalo, spoke to the lack of real reporting. Garofalo specifically talks about how it is hard to find a main stream media source that is putting out hard hitting journalistic pieces. I couldn’t agree with this clip more!