News sources should stop sensationalism

Yellow journalism, or sensationalist stories, about benign topics are nothing revolutionary in today’s press. Since 1895, when Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst began sensationalizing headlines to sell papers, news outlets worldwide have followed suit with their own trumped-up unimportant stories. Unfortunately, in an increasingly digital age with a 24-hour news cycle, the ability of news media today to report on the most boring and unimportant issues has been crowding out important stories about the changing world.

 

In the digital age, news organizations are finding a variety of ways to force unimportant news coverage on the masses. According to Neilsen ratings, televised news remains popular, and Fox News has been the leader in cable news for the last decade, with CNN and MSNBC following behind. According to Alexa, an Internet research subsidiary of Amazon, Yahoo News is the most popular among internet news, followed by CNN, the Huffington Post, and Reddit. Interestingly, Reddit is a social network where users award each other with Internet points known as “karma” for posting popular links to cat videos, funny pictures, pornography or, evidently, news stories. As such, calling Reddit a news website is laughable. Reddit is an embodiment of yellow journalism by anonymous Internet masses.

The plague of yellow journalism is not limited to Reddit, however. Increasingly, news organizations seem to be in the business of making money first, and generating quality reports second. Perusing the front pages of the websites of each of these news sites supposed international coverage garners reports on a Saudi man beating a servant (CNN), Cuba closing movie theaters (NBC), and Qatar removing a statue of two head-butting soccer players (Fox). Frankly, the majority of the “news” stories on the front pages of the international sections of the most viewed news organizations are pieces that should be relegated to local news outfits, not multinational news corporations. Most of these stories are not going to be relevant for more than a day, if even that. Putting them on the front pages of international news sections gives the stories more weight than they deserve.

In some cases, this kind of international news coverage actually makes viewers less informed. A report from Fairleigh Dickson University found that, on average, Fox News viewers actually knew less about domestic and international events than people who watched no news at all. The most informed people were those who regularly listened to NPR broadcasts. Part of the problem is probably that Fox reports junk that clogs their front page and prevents actual news from getting coverage.

For well-respected news organizations with the resources to deploy reporters around the globe, reporting on pieces that should be local issues is a waste of their time and resources. This type of reporting wastes the resources of news organizations because they fail to report on important stories that can have international impact. It encourages readers to become more concerned with stories that are not going to have an impact on the world, like soccer statues in Qatar, rather than continuing conflict in the Middle East, international rifts over spying, or any one of the other numerous stories that should be at the forefront of the minds of educated people.

The reason that this type of news coverage exists is to make money. In some sense, it is a necessary evil, as stories that go viral about tiny issues but generate temporary readership for news organizations also generate advertisement revenue. The only way to make a business work is to have a certain amount of revenue, and banal stories about the world generate more revenue than hard-hitting stories with analysis about global topics.

But other business models for news coverage exist. In some instances, news organizations do a good job of balancing less important but more sensation stories with hard-hitting journalism; NPR has some of these stories that help generate donations to the site, but still does the best in creating informed viewers. The BBC operates off a similar model, and as a result of British tax cuts in recent years, the BBC has actually trimmed back less important programming in favor of keeping strong news coverage, according to The Economist. Other news organizations charge subscription fees, such as The Economist, The New York Times and the Foreign Affairs Journal, but these papers use the subscription process as a way of targeting only a select group of readers and making sure that their exemplary coverage is geared toward internationally relevant events, with analysis from seasoned reporters, academics and political leaders.

There are two divergent paths for news coverage in the modern age: Either news moguls can use global reporting to bring quality news and analysis to readers at a fast pace with a high quality, or news organizations can engage in yellow journalism, favor quantity over quality, and attempt to monetize content at the expense of an informed populace. For everyone’s sake, hopefully the latter will become less common in the near future.

 

Dan Morgan-Russell is a sophomore majoring in international relations (global business). His column “Going Global” runs Mondays.

Follow Dan on Twitter @ginger_breaddan