Watching the news has become an adverse chore in today's world. Every time we turn on the news, it's only coverage that involves murders, natural disasters, rape, and a plethora of other stories that dampen anyone's mood. What a lot of people don't realize is what the media is actually doing to you as you watch it.
Over the course of the past several months into 2016, we can all agree that many different situations, like the Orlando shooting, bombing in Belgium, and the death of Alton Sterling are all tragic events that happened in our world. It's no surprise that the media was quick to jump on all of these situations, coming out with different stories across the spectrum, but here's what people need to be more aware of.
Fox News and CNN are probably one of the most biased news stations in our country (Fox News being more conservative and CNN being more liberal) so these different companies are going to push different agendas with their news coverage. A lot of my friends and family fail to try to get perspectives from different sides, and tend to only agree with one extreme or the other. I feel as though more Americans need to gain a broader knowledge base of news coverage from different stations, rather than just basing their opinions off of one source. I especially see this on social media. A lot of my friends (and I will admit I have done this before) share news from completely biased resources. Most of which mainly post satire on their websites. While this may be all fun and games, some people actually believe everything they see and hear, which is not being an informed citizen.
Take the Alton Sterling shooting for example. When the media first sent out the coverage to the world, everyone was in disgust, which I completely understand. Everyone should mourn the loss of a fellow American. However what I started to notice was people sharing these posts about how "it was entirely the cops fault" or "it was entirely Sterling's fault" and I think this is where the issues arise. Until detectives and criminal justice professionals have time to thoroughly assess the situation and what actually happened, people shouldn't be so quick to judge and criticize others, especially generalizing groups of people as a whole. A video is a good solid piece of evidence, but not everyone has the background to look at a video and critique everything that happened. I really do feel people need to be a little less aggressive with the way they handle these situations.
Police brutality is a thing that our country deals with, and I do believe racism and prejudice against specific people is a re-occurrence that we face on a day to day basis, but instead of taking things to heart so easily, try and see things from other people's point of view, and realize that we do have a justice system (whether it being corrupt or not) and we have it for a reason.
