Newspapers have long been an intrinsic part of our everyday culture. At one time they were the main sources of outside information for perhaps the majority of Americans. However the scant pages-long daily news sources of our grandparents have today morphed into inch-thick tomes with some articles reaching near novella length. As the American newspaper has grown larger and longer, we as a culture have ironically stopped paying but a sound-bytes worth of attention to them. The quaint print versions of the 20th century have given way to online news websites and short blurbs worked into the homepages of many search engines. The internet had changed news-writing forever. Readership of print newspapers is down as subscriptions to local printed papers are hitting an all time low, all the while websites and search engines such as Yahoo and Google have become the most looked-at news sources in America.
Not only has the mode of news access changed in the past 20 years but so also has the quality of these means of information. If one were to open today’s copy of the Dallas Morning News and read even one section of it,(for example the Metro section), there would no doubt be a dozen or so blatant spelling and mechanical errors. This may partly be the effect of low print readership as newspaper producers must work with ever decreasing budgets which leads inexorably to fewer editors and fact-checkers to verify and correct these obvious and embarrassing mistakes. Also, shockingly little of what we may read in a print newspaper is an original story; researched and investigated by a staff member of the paper, but rather a reused and recycled print version sound-byte which originally appeared on an internet news blurb.
The trend away from both print source newspapers and quality reporting are a shocking clue as to the movement of our society into the 21st century. People are less inclined to read something printed with ink on paper than they are to immerse themselves into a computer screen for their news-fix. More shocking even than this reversal is the decline in intelligent writing which may be seen in both types of new reporting. The notice of these two trends is clear enough; however what is not nearly so plain is why this trend has occurred.
Studying and understanding why and how this quick reversal and regression have happened would be enormously important to our modern society because of the way people respond to the news nowadays, which is, in a word, reactionary. A reactionary public is volatile and unpredictable. The way the public reacts to an idea in pop political culture, (which is what news articles have for the most part become), can tilt the outcome of the initial conflict in a very crucial way. If people are angry, they will not reason as rational beings and the angry mob has the potential to do a significant amount of damage.
In my own research concerning these subjects I wish to understand, for one thing, why are print newspapers struggling so badly to keep up amid the internet new boom, and is there anything which may be done about it? But besides the overall academic quality of news writing, I wish to better understand the methods and reasons, whether they are employed subliminally or fully intentioned, that news writing incited the public so hotly. Specifically, I plan to research the hysteria behind the many media fueled disease scares, for example the Swine Flu scare of 2009 and the Bird Flu and Egg-Salmonella type of media-fueled panic.
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