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Media Series: Post 1–Media in Macro, How Information Flows
By Jared | March 28, 2008
How does the media work on a large scale? Why do national events grab the spotlight? If you pay any attention, you see the “it bleeds, it leads” mentality at work in the media. Fewer people bother to go deeper than a cynical comment or two in asking how news is made. That question is both important and interesting all by itself.
News is selected by what is most interesting to people, not necessarily by what is most important. Why is that? Yes, partly because the media want audience, but not entirely.
Picture the “media” as a pyramid. At the bottom, you have the local papers in which are published all varieties of stories, from a report on the local high schools to the car accident that closed off Main Street yesterday. Sprinkled throughout these stories are a few that might gain wider interest, such as the one about the school bus that got torn open by a snowplow. In my home town of Burns, Wyoming (200 people), there is no newspaper. Pine Bluffs, however, does have a paper, the Pine Bluffs Post. Cheyenne, Wyoming, my state’s capitol also has a paper, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. These are the local papers of my area. (There are also small television and radio stations.)
At our pyramid’s next level might be the regional news media. (Usually the media in larger cities.) These media, such as the Denver Post, the Casper Star Tribune (my state’s paper of record), or the Denver television news channels (or 850 KOA, Denver’s talk radio station), will both gather stories from the smaller papers around them and have their own reporting staff to do their work for them. They might pick up the story about the snow slow, because it killed several school children and that is, in their minds, newsworthy. They pass over the stories about small town high schools and car accidents. Who in Denver cares that the mayor of Pine Bluffs got pulled over for driving under the influence? Nobody. A school bus gets peeled open like a sardine can? Now that’s news.
This pyramid keeps going up to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the national television news stations, and other media. At some layers you might begin adding blogs, larger radio stations, cable television, columnists, etc.
By the time we reach the top, most of the “new” in news has disappeared, and the media are just picking up stories from smaller media sources. (Yes, politics and investigative journalism are exceptions, but national news sources rely primarily on others for their information.) Once a story has been determined to be newsworthy, the larger media send their own people to report on it (or just rebroadcast the story with their own analysis after making a few phone calls to verify it.)
Within hours of this story being reported, it was picked up by national news stations. Seen in perspective, this story was hardly worthy of national news. (How many people do you think are hurt or killed by snowplow/school bus collisions compared to knife-fights in inner-city schools?) It was just a car accident. Tragic, yes, but hardly earth-shattering. Black ice and car accidents happen every winter.
The fact is, nobody is guiding national news to the important issues. No single person or group of people makes those decisions. Part of news judgment is based on “magnitude” (how many people a story affects) and once a national media outlet picks up a story, it gains some magnitude. Reporters and editors make their own calls on magnitude, and, when it comes down to it, they’re really shooting blind. Is it any wonder, then, that we get such a random patchwork conglomeration in the “news?”
(Please note, it CAN be argued that the story about the snow plow was legitimate and should have had the place it did. I don’t care to argue the point. I’m simply using that as an example of how stories are passed from one media outlet to the next.)
Topics: Current Affairs, Politics, Principles, Societal Problems |