In an era where Facebook is considered a news source and people think changing their profile picture is enough to show support, media has become so tangled with fads and trends that the news is often buried. Sure our news feeds will be flooded with posts about the same issues for the day, but then what? We move on to the next big thing without so much as a glance backwards. Anyone contributing to the spread of information might as well be screaming into a black hole. Even as I write this I know most will scroll past it looking for the next funny dog video.
Media practices have become too fast paced. Instead of seeing an issue through, being thorough and completing a story, most media companies are trying to capture the attentions of their readers. In order to keep up with the changing interests of the public, news sources will abandon stories to jump on the bandwagon of the latest trending topic. This isn’t necessarily their fault because they are doing whatever they can to make a profit and keep their company alive, not an easy feat. As time passes we have less and less news companies creating original material. This means that less people are going out to discover stories and more are just giving their own take on something that’s been told before. An illustration of this is CNN, a worldwide leader in news. In 2013 they eliminated their entire investigative journalism department. After looking at the numbers they decided it wasn’t worth it to send journalists to other nations because their resulting reports weren’t bringing in enough money. The American public isn’t interested in drug smuggling in Africa or child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Simply put, investigative journalism isn’t sexy enough to keep the viewers interested and is, therefore, becoming obsolete.
The root of the problem is that audiences just aren’t interested in the things that matter. Local news shows have become a competition of who can scare viewers the most using common themes like “crime seeping into the suburbs” and “what in your house might be killing you.” Furthermore the attention span of the public is extremely problematic. If by chance real news makes it into mainstream media, it is obsessed over for a few days and then completely forgotten. Take, for example, the sentencing of Brock Turner. After raping a woman and getting a sentence of six months in jail, his face and name were all over Facebook and the TV news. All news outlets were focused on this story and rightfully so because it was a gross injustice, but where is that up in arms spirit now? Without constant attention there will be no change no matter how many shares, likes, and tweets were dedicated to this cause. The world gave us another tragedy to focus on and everyone jumped ship like it was the Titanic.
As a society we need to learn to focus on what really matters. I’ve had enough of my Facebook feed being flooded with one real report of news for a few days and then going back to a mindless stream of dog videos, over sharing, celebrity “news” and whatever else is going on in mainstream media until the next tragedy arrives. We can’t correct the injustices around us if we don’t start caring, and changing your profile picture so it has a relevant filter is not caring enough.
