I have to congratulate educators of our youth’s awareness of news media biases. Kids these days pick up on the selling aspect of news broadcasting. People enjoy watching conflicts and consider harmony boring, so news media delivers this product to its viewers with emphasis. Kids also understand the pictorial angle is important and that it can manipulate viewers. Promotions with catchy tunes and coverage of daring reporters being filmed near the line of fire give stations an aura of ubiquitousness and foresight. They also know journalists can sensationalize the most insignificant piece of news, creating controversy and drama.
Let’s not forget to talk about the political biases we find in television and newspaper reporting. News can never be reported in an unbiased manner because language itself can never be neutral. So slants on words become a tool for news media to sublimely indoctrinate liberal or conservative views in the minds of their public.
According to the Pew Research Center’s study which compared preferred news information sources in 2010, 65% of the population under 30 years of age cited the Internet as their main news outlet, a figure that has doubled since 2007. One can hardly blame them for choosing the Internet as the favorite go-to place for news any more than one can criticize someone choosing to shop at Walmart rather than Macy’s. One can find anything they need at Walmart; everything you want to know about is at your fingertips on the Internet. You can personalize what news you want to watch and when you want to watch it, unlike television or newspaper news that airs at specific times during the day or goes to print at certain times at night. Although all news sites have advertisements, they aren’t flung at you in such repetition as on TV and they don’t have to be manually sifted through to get to the rest of a story that might be buried somewhere in the second to last page of a section of a newspaper. Perhaps the most salient feature that draws consumers to the Internet is the fact that it is free.
Major news journalists will eventually have to find their niche on the cyber highway. It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult a task. However, I don’t see this increasing the viewing of news in younger generations that much. Our society leans very heavily on being visually entertained. Reading for many is just too boring. As the shift is made, as I believe it most certainly will to electronic news media, the potency of news broadcasting will diminish. We will have later generations that don’t know what’s going on in the world from either a biased or unbiased point of view because reading the news won’t be the biggest reason for accessing the Internet. And when it is, I fear that many will make judgments based on a single article that is read, without necessarily taking into account its sources or contradictory points of view. Kind of the same scenario we have now, eh?
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