Off topic but on topic: Can these sensational headlines be an opportunity?
There was a time where people used to get their news from the local paper. On their walk to work they would pick up the newspaper at the corner news stand and read about the world’s events on their bus to work. If a headline grabbed their attention, they would read the story. If it was of no interest they would skip over it and move on. Some people pulled out the business section, because that’s all they cared about. Others would jump right to sports, or world news. But the newspaper was their only option to receive current events, so the few dozen pages between the front page and the back cover of the local newspaper had a monopoly on reader’s attention.
In the 1950s, televisions became more popular in households. They were mostly black and white, small screens with a handful of channel selections that covered a broad selection of entertainment choices intended to appeal to the entire family. There were kids shows, variety shows, news shows, etc. With the limited channel choices and the headache of having to adjust the antennae to tune the image to something that was visible, most families took in the content that was fed to them.
By the 80’s, cable television expanded the number of channels people could chose from. It also added niche stations. If you wanted to listen to music all day, you had MTV. If you wanted News, there was CNN. No longer was content limited to the finite amount of printed pages between covers of a newspaper, now there was all-news, all-the time. With that, news outlets had to come up with more content to fill the hours. Not only would they need to jazz up the content to keep viewers engaged, but they had to target the content to an audience because there were now other channels competing for the viewership.
Then came the internet and everything exploded! The billions of pages of the world wide web became the world’s newspaper and anyone with an internet connection and a social media account became a journalist. No longer could you pull out the section that interests you or watch the channel you preferred. Now artificial intelligence fed your stories to you and directed your preferences.
A couple of weeks ago, a former employee of Facebook, turned whistleblower, called into question the Company’s ethics, saying that the social network put profits over safety, It remains to see how significant the societal impact will be, but this is hardly a revelation.
in 1912, the Titanic became one of the worlds biggest stories and one of the first times in history that news outlets competed for attention. As an archive of Titanic headlines states, “Newspapers fed the public interest in the Titanic disaster by publishing sensational banner headlines, reports, stories, special sections, photographs, and editorials. This collection shows the result of different efforts to balance the need to sell newspapers and the reporting of accurate information.” The disparity between the reports are incredible. One British paper even reported that there were no casualties!
Since that time, the balance has shifted even further from the responsibility to report accurate information towards the need to sell advertising space.The internet has made things so much worse, but has not been the origin of skewed messaging. Depending on which cable network you watched, the last presidential administration was an entirely different experience. Local news stations air scary teasers, such as “Could your drinking water be poisoning you, story at 11” to induce viewers to tune into their channel. And newspaper headlines needed to be more sensational to sell papers about the Titanic. Why is the Facebook whistleblower even relevant?
As we often ask ourselves in the reform/abolition movement, “what will be the tipping point”? What can we point to in a chronology of events where the registry shifted from “remedial” to “punitive”? Here too, will the Facebook whistleblower become a tipping point in the public’s demand for responsible reporting? Will it cause everyone to question the validity of everything they read? Will there be a shift back towards truth and integrity, or have things gotten too far gone and it’ll just continue getting worse?
We are currently in Halloween month. The season where Patch runs their series of scare stories naming and shaming people on the registry and local news stations will be rehashing the same myths they recycle every year. The stories are unquestionably intended to scare parents into tuning in or clicking on the headlines. As we’ve repeatedly reported, year over year, these stories are not grounded in fact.
While we won’t be able to control what is fed to the audience, what if we used these click-bait stories to our advantage? What if we filled the comments section of each article with facts? What if we pointed out how inaccurate the reported information is and instead, posted pages and pages of anti-registry information? We always talk about educating the public and getting out message in front of the right audience? Maybe this season is our opportunity to turn this attention in our favor?
Something to think about.
It has been said that the oldest occupation was prostitution but actually thats wrong or who is thy brothers keeper. I’m sure the oldest occupating was harvesting or herding. Today its intimidation in many ways, means, and measures. Its all about the money today or love of money in many circles. One wonders if prostitution was the only opportunity to make a living at for a single person.
I myself would rather lose than win. If one win’s there goes their pride. If one loses, try, try again. I’m sure it took time to invent smoke signals or even to plan. Same as telephone, cables, trains and tracks. Even the invention of the wheel was at times good and used for bad purposes.
Still the tongue no one can tame. While Florida has its good, bad, and ugly vices doesn’t all states have some potato head busybody in Iowa or Idaho…….
Wikipedia has this as a description of Phobia:
A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder defined by a persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation. Phobias typically, result in a rapid onset of fear and are present for more than six months. Those affected will go to great lengths to avoid the situation or object, to a degree greater than the actual danger posed.
If you look at how persons with a past sex offense conviction are treated, especially around Halloween, it must mean that most people in the U.S. have a clinical disorder.
Anonymous
Great point. Love it!!!
Sounds like the coolest idea since ice-cream! If we flood each posting with dozens of comments pointing out the fallacy of their position people might get the message. FAC send us a link to the posting along with suggested facts to include in our reply. We put the facts in our own words and fire away. We may not change other’ minds, but we can get them thinking! And maybe doing their own research?
Thank You for expressing your thoughts here. I too have been thinking along those same lines lately.
Also in the news lately was about little 3 yr. old Christopher in the Houston Texas area. There was a lot of effort from the public to find the little boy. All to no avail till someone happened to hear some crying near there property and found him after 4 days. Thank God, he is all right.
The boys mother automatically from the first was saying on the news, “ someone has kidnaped him.”Why would she automatically think that way? And how much of the efforts to find him were spent on checking out the list on the registry instead of looking at where he could have possibly could have wandered off to. We will probably never know but it just makes me wonder if more effort could have been directed in the right direction success could have been achieved quicker.
Here in Jacksonville we had a similar case, a brother and sister went missing around Christmas time a couple years ago(give or take). All the news could focus on was the “alarming” amount of registrants in the area (it was about 40 I think) and that JSO was making sure to vet each and every one of them. They also kept chasing false leads because a ” white car driven by a male” was seen in the area about the time the kids wandered off. Meanwhile those two kids were literally just hiding in the woods roughly 500 feet from their home,and they did so for about two days(not exactly sure on the time-line) They hid out in an old pump house, that had allegedly been searched on the first day. The only real consolation was the general attitude on social media concerning the registrants being essentially interrogated, was negative towards law enforcement. Most people posting thought I was a waste of time and that those kids were probably still in the area. It was refreshing to see some common sense for once.
Encouraging that those on social media saw through local news’ hysteria!
People waking up to the fact that you can’t use the registry to locate missing kids.
Communications have been in controversy ever since ‘smoke signals’ were invented. On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call ever. Moments later he was notified that his car’s extended warranty had expired. The answer is trying to live a flawless life so that any negative commentary can be assumed to be a lie. Newspapers and the internet have positive and negative aspects. We must be ready to counter the negative with ‘cold/hard’ facts and let the public decide when the credibility of newspapers and internet have expired.
This was a very well written article. The point I want to add is my own opinion that we don’t have very many “journalists” anymore. What we do have is a vast majority of entertainers posing as journalists in an environment that’s reminiscent of the USSR Pravda days.
Fake news and propaganda is nothing new. Ben Franklin created fake newspapers to influence British citizens.
Each new form of media helped usher in new waves of moral panics and particularly sex panics.
The 1980s gave us the first 24 hour news networks. How were they going to make news an all day every day thing whereas news had been limited to newspapers or half hour news shows? Dimple– use if sensationalism.
The rise of “reality tv” has been overlooked as a platform for propaganda as well. Fox us Cops then followed up with America’s Most Wanted, which led to true crime shows and dramas like SVU.
We cannot overlook the powerful and negative influences of the media that preceded the Internet.