Today I was on the front page of Yahoo while going to check my email. As I looked at the recent news, one of the first articles that popped up was about David Beckham and his wife Victoria, and how they are expected a baby. Don't get me wrong, this isn't bad news, but I was surprised that it was paired right next to an article about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It seemed to me that stories of the natural disasters in Japan would be given more coverage than recent celeb baby news.It definitely makes me wonder what is considered important news. The death toll in Japan is continuously climbing, hundreds of thousands of people are evacuating, but still, many people feel that the personal life of their favorite celebrities takes the cake over groundbreaking news. I feel that the country should be more aware of what is going on around them, and while Japan is certainly getting a lot of coverage, I feel they should be getting more. Next time you're on Yahoo, or any news site for that matter, look around and see what the top stories are. You may be surprised at what you find.
Interesting Kristen. Part of me wants to say they did this to "lighten up the mood." I feel the media doesn't want to soley portray all depressing and sad news stories. How would that make the readers feel? For example, what if I picked up a newspaper that had the headlines, "Three Murdered," "Israel is Suffering," and "Tsunami Destroys Japan." These are heavy, I know after seeing these my hopes wouldn't be too high. So maybe news stations use small happy stories (just like the Beckham baby) as some sort of bait, to keep readers returning.
ReplyDeleteJust a thought!
On my homepage, MSN.com, they have actually created a new tab specifically for news about Japan while still running main articles about Japan on their major news reel. I think that this was a good solution to providing news about Japan and keeping it as accessible as possible. Obviously news sites have to keep posting different news because they are competing with other news sites. They also need to keep news about things like Beckham's baby on the main page because there are people who would rather read about celeb gossip rather than the news on Japan even though everyone should really be focusing on the latter.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely that sometimes news stations have a completely skewed opinion of what's important. If you're still interested, my post (http://sambem.blogspot.com/2010/09/is-this-whats-important.html)covers a lot of similar issues you have here. Thanks for calling out Yahoo! on what they should be focusing on
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