the news This week I decided to look at three local news networks late night news at 11pm. The three networks I watched were 22 News, 7 News, and Newscenter 5 Late. If I were to say I was overwhelmingly surprised at my results I would be lying. After watching I tallied up the amount of stories that were told in each broadcast, minus weather and sports, and then I tallied up the amount of those stories that were either violent or were fearful in some way or another.
22 News- out of 17 stories 6 were either violent or fear inducing
7 News- out of 13 stories 7 were either violent or fear inducing
Newscenter 5- out of 16 stories 12 either violent or fear inducing
Side note- watching these programs made me remember why stopped watching local news or news on television in general. I walked away from the television feeling in dismay. Story after story of houses on fire, child pornographers working in elementary schools and as little league coaches, theft, missing children made concerned momentarily that there was little good in the world. This was especially shocking considering that I have studied this phenomenon for four years now and it still resonates this strong.
Now the reason I wasn’t shocked at these results was that this is something that we as an American culture have been conditioned to expect. As Hall describes culture can be defined by shared conceptual maps “shared language systems and the codes which govern the relationships between of translation between them”. To put this in context of the news we look at our expectation of seeing stories that scares and induces fear or has violent imagery. It has become our shared conceptual map that we are to be scared when we watch the news. This is only given meaning because for our whole lives, if you have lived in the US, we have been bombarded with this type of imagery. The sign in this case is the news, the language is the images shown and story told, and the code to interpret it is fear.
The code of fear that runs our news’ programs conditions viewers to be scared even before we hear the story. The thing I find funny about these programs is the broadcasters pleasant tone and chipper banter in between stories. They scare us and then try to entice us right back with something warmhearted to ease the pain. Are broadcasters above our conceptual map of fear or just in control of it? They talk about murders, abductions, and riots, yet they seem so calm and at ease. This desensitizes us to violence because the broadcaster just flashed a million dollar smile after an endearing tale about child pornography. They make us believe that the world is a terrible place, but that’s normal. Then they’ll be back tomorrow with the same set of stories just different names and places.
ReplyDeleteI found similar amounts of stories in the news that were violent or fearful. In my blog I posted a screen shot of my hometowns local news website. Under the 'Top Stories' column, three stories were about the cause and effect of different house fires, two were about how people were seriously injured in car accidents, and one was about a kidnapping.
ReplyDeleteI too have had a kind of epiphany of why I HATE watching the news while writing my blog post! I have also paired the news with extreme negativity. While I was in grade school I remember eating breakfast every morning with my mom while she was watching the news Watching the news now not only reminds me of going to grade school (which I dreaded at the time), it reminds me of the 'violent' and fearful messages I was injected with every single morning growing up. I sometimes wonder since I was exposed to these fearful messages first thing almost every morning if I unconsciously made a connection school and fear.