Washington is said to be filled with movers and shakers, but I don’t think any of us were prepared for this start of fall semester.
I had never experienced an earthquake before and felt the tremors as I was riding down the elevator of my apartment building. I did have a fleeting thought of panic before the doors opened, where the stern woman working the front desk was frantically answering the multiple phone lines.
That incident, coupled with the storm that is brewing outside my apartment windows as I type this, has me thinking of natural disasters.
Specifically, how the media responds to them. It made me wonder, are we crying wolf? Certainly Irene will do horrible damage, but when I look to mainstream media for news, I only find myself shaking my head at its hyperbolic statements and perhaps the tinge of glee on the faces of the weathermen who have so few chances to shine.
The only place, it seems, to really find short, accurate quips about current situations appears to be Twitter. CNN’s headline could be something like “Killer storm of the century about to rock east coast; mandatory evacuation routes in place.” Yadda yadda yadda.
On the other hand, CNN’s Twitter feeds reads, “Mayor Bloomberg says NYC mass transit will shut at noon because of Hurricane.”
Is the 140-character revolution bringing back into vogue the old ideas about journalism, where we drop the Oxford comma to make room for more characters in our biweekly columns and keep sentences short, simple and to the point? (Being a rhetoric columnist, I feel no inclination to follow this general rule; I love my semicolons too much.)
The era of the 24-hour news channel brought about sense of having enough time, something news programs didn’t have before CNN started broadcasting. News corporations now have so much time to tell stories that they invented an entire new form of news: infotainment.
Not that there isn’t enough news to keep these channels running for 24 hours, but Americans like their entertainment with a slice of news, not the other way around.
“The View” is tied for the number one Daytime TV program and “60 Minutes” is the only news program to break into the top 10 Nielson-rated shows on an average weekly basis in 6th place.
Either the key is that Barbara Walters looks better in the morning or people prefer to watch celebrities talk about world problems rather than people who actually experience them.
The average moderately intelligent newspaper in this country, the New York Times or the Washington Post for instance, has a reading level of roughly around 9th grade. Something definitely is to be said about the American education system in that regard, but part of that can be linked to our relationship to how we like our language.
It seems that we can only really focus on an event if it is made into a doomsday situation. Hyperbole is important, but does it have a place in the media? When everything becomes the worst something, does it really matter? We’ve stopped intelligent discussion about news and replaced it with doomsday watches and overly sensationalized stories.
I look at the images on my TV screen and I can see the devastation, I can hear the howls of the 30 mph wind, but the weatherman is so overdone that I can’t take him seriously. Irene is personified out of proportion; she’s spun out of control.
Francesca Morizio is a double major in the College of Arts and Sciences and Kogod. Please send comments and responses to:
edpage@theeagleonline.com
