4/14/14 “Bus station bomb in Nigeria kills 71, injures 124”
4/15/14 “Hamas praises shooting that killed Israeli man, wounded his wife and son”
4/16/14 “At least four dead and hundreds missing after South Korean ferry sinks off country’s southwestern coast”
4/17/14 “Fate of over 100 kidnapped girls is unknown, Nigeria says”
4/17/14 “South Korea ferry riders texted desperate messages to loved ones as boat sank”
4/16/14 “At least four dead and hundreds missing after South Korean ferry sinks off country’s southwestern coast”
4/17/14 “Fate of over 100 kidnapped girls is unknown, Nigeria says”
4/17/14 “South Korea ferry riders texted desperate messages to loved ones as boat sank”
4/18/14 “Thirteen Sherpa guides killed in Mount Everest avalanche ahead of televised jump”
4/18/14 “NASA discovers Earth-like planet that could support life”
4/19/14 “Hoaxers send fake texts claiming to be from South Korean ferry victims; ship’s captain charged with five violations”
4/19/14 “7.8-magnitude quake strikes near Papua New Guinea”
4/19/14 “Wyoming landslide splits a home in two as it creeps down a hill”
4/20/14 “South Korean ferry crippled with confusion and indecision before it sank”
4/20/14 “Malaysia Airlines flight rescheduled after emergency landing”
4/20/14 “Police investigating possible pipe bomb at Portland college”
"...harms and benefits of the "zing."
Wednesday, April 16, 2014. 8:55 a.m (Tuesday, April 15, 2014. 5:55 p.m. our time): A South Korean ferry carrying nearly 300 high school students began to tip over and sink into the Yellow Sea.
Thursday, April 17, 2014. 3:02 a.m.: A woman drops off a 10-pack stack of USA Today newspapers at the front desk of Quality Inn. The headline boldly reads “HUNDREDS ON FERRY FEARED DEAD.”
This is how I get my news. I choose to not use social media to get information, relying, instead, on printed newspapers. Does this make the news any more accurate? No.
Every reporter buys into the “zing” of reporting. It’s part of the job. Are ethics thrown out the window when doing this? For the most part, I say yes.
Looking at the above headlines, note the ones listed in red font. For the first brief part of this blog, I am choosing to narrow my focus on the recent South Korean ferry that sank into the Yellow Sea.
The earliest-dated headline from the New York Daily News reads: “At least four dead and hundreds missing after South Korean ferry sinks off country’s southwestern coast”.
The next headline from the New York Daily News reads: “South Korea ferry riders texted desperate message to loved ones as boat sank”. Skip a day in the reporting on this story (at least on the home page of World Headlines at www.nydailynews.com) and the next headline reads: “Hoaxers send fake texts claiming to be from South Korea ferry victims”.
Hold on just a minute: www.nydailynews.com makes this bold headline as if they themselves aren’t included in the “hoaxers” portion of the headline. Aren’t they just as guilty? Didn’t the Associated Press jump on the previous headline and related story just as fast as anyone else? This begs the question, how reliable are the sources of the New York Daily News?
The zing of trying to report devastating news can most certainly cause further devastation for those directly involved. Think of those parents who first heard of the disaster and held onto hope of their child surviving. Then they receive a text, stating that their child is fine, or at least they are given hope that the child initially made it to safety. Waiting on pins and needles to hear the next update, they are then told that the text was a hoax. This in itself is horrifyingly wrong, but for the reporters who jumped in on the zing of it, makes it doubly wrong.
These days it doesn’t even seem to matter if the news is reported inaccurately. The news outlets only seem to care about who releases breaking news first. If there are things reported that haven’t been verified, and they later prove to be false, the media will simply do an “update” without even apologizing for the earlier misinformation.
I don’t have a Twitter account and when I feel like having a Facebook account I rarely use it. One could say I’m not up-to-speed on catching the news. I wait around for the print and even then I don’t read all of it. The headline is usually as far as I get.
Ironically, I took up a job working for the news where I was required to write more than just a headline. I never wasted my time reading the rest of the day’s publications because reporting the news was far too much news in my life.
While working for St. George News, a local online news publication, I picked up a little of an “authenticity zing” of my own. I covered over 100 stories, 37 of them being uniquely my own. My zing started with jealousy when a reporter from KSL or The Spectrum would show up on what I would claim as my turf for getting there first.
When the event being covered would come to a conclusion me and all my little competitor reporter buddies would all jump in our cars and race ourselves back to our computers. Then it was a pattern of “type, type, type” on my story and then “refresh, refresh, refresh” on all my competitor’s sites. Type, type. Refresh. Type, type, type. Refresh, refresh. Type. Refresh.... You get it. It’s a race against time, your competitor and your own best knowledge of the event.
If I was the first one to publish the story I would feel stressed that The Spectrum would later release theirs with more information. Maybe they were making a phone call, gathering more information, while I speedily wrote my short story and got it out to the public first. Then if I was the last one to publish my story I would be worried that the public would be bored of the subject by then and wouldn’t need the one who’s late in the race. There was no “let’s hold hands and hit ‘publish’ at the same time” with my competitors and that was the jealously issue I had with my zing. I would be willing to bet that this attitude accompanies most reporters.
Social media can be good because people listen and watch and are eager to be the first to pass on the “news”. It can be helpful to the police and can promote a better qualify of life for us. As for “the sort of zing of authenticity” when using a police scanner, it can have pros and cons. Police departments will often use private channels to communicate but sometimes their conversations get broadcast across multiple channels. If you don’t have every channel programmed into your scanner, chances are that you’re not getting the full story. This certainly will impact our perception of what’s really going on. As with the Boston Marathon story and the interview with Brooke Gladstone and Alex Goldman, I personally think that the whole situation could have really gotten out of control if the bomber had been able to listen in on the police scanner or to read the Twitter feeds to find out the updates of their strategies. Many lives could have been compromised.
Because of social media, we can expect to be informed in real time on just about any topic. Our family members and close friends act as reporters and alert us when they feel something important has happened or is happening. We are always connected. But sometimes, as evidenced in this blog, it can steer us off course.
Douglas Rushkoff, in his blog “There’s More to Being a Journalist Than Hitting The ‘Publish’ Button”, states, in part: “...a professional journalist isn’t just someone who has access to the newswires, or at least it shouldn’t be. A professional newsperson is someone who is not only trained to pursue a story and deconstruct propaganda, but someone who has been paid to spend the time and energy required to do so effectively. Corporations and governments alike spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on their public relations and communications strategies. They hire professionals to tell or, more often, obfuscate their stories. Without a crew of equally qualified—if not equally funded—professionals to analyze and challenge these agencies’ fictions, we are defenseless against them.
“And thus, we end up in the same place we were before—only worse, because now we believe we own and control the media that has actually owned and controlled us all along.”
Every wants to be first with the news. They want the zing. They want to brag about being the first to report the “news”. Who wants to report the “olds”? This is evidenced in several commercials from AT&T where they brag that the new HTC Vivid phone keeps you up to date, and that other phones’ speed connectivities are “sooo 47 seconds ago”.
Everyone wants to be first, especially in the case of a disaster. I think that the zing is more prevalent when it’s bad news. I leave you with comments from George Carlin, a comedian who takes a no-bars-held approach to how humans operate, and describes it best:
“...I enjoy chaos and disorder. Not just because it helps me professionally. They’re also my hobby. You see, I’m an entropy fan. I’m an entropy fan. When I first heard of entropy in high school science, I was attracted to it immediately. When they told me that in nature, all systems are breaking down, I thought, ‘What a good thing! What a GOOD thing! Perhaps I can make some small contribution in this area myself!’ And, of course, it’s not just in nature: in this country, the whole social structure [is] just beginning to collapse. You watch. Just beginning now to come apart at the edges and the seams. And the thing that I like about THAT is that it means it makes the news on television more interesting. It makes the television news more exciting, makes it more fun. I watch the news on television for one thing and one thing only: entertainment. That’s all I want from the news: entertainment. You know my favorite thing on television? Bad news! Bad news and accidents and disasters and catastrophes. I want to see some explosions and fires. I want to see shit blowing up and I want to see bodies flying around! I’m not interested in the budget! I don’t care about tax negotiations! I don’t wanna know the country the fuckin’ pope is in! But you show me a hospital that’s on fire and people are on crutches, jumping off the roof, and I’m a happy guy! I’m a happy guy! I’m a happy guy! I want to see a paint factory blowing up! I want to see an oil refinery explode! I want to see a tornado in church on Sunday! I want to see some guy running through the K-Mart with an automatic weapon, firing at the clerks! I want to see thousands of people in the street, killing policemen. I want to hear about a nuclear meltdown. I want to know the stock market dropped two thousand points in one day. I want to see people under pressure! Sirens! Flames! Smoke! Bodies, graves being filled, parents weeping. Exciting shit! My kind of tv! I just want some entertainment! It’s just the kind of guy I am! It’s the kind of guy I am! You know what I love the most? When big chunks of concrete and firey wood are falling out of the sky and people are running around, trying to get out of the way! Exciting shit! ... Hey, at least I admit it! At least I admit it! Most people wouldn’t admit to those feelings. Most people see something like that on television and they say, ‘Oh, isn’t that awful! Isn’t that too bad?’ (Snort) Lying asshole! Lyin’ assholes! You love it and you know it! Explosions are fun! And, hey! The closer the explosion is to your house, the more fun it is! Did you ever notice that? Sometimes you have the tv on and you’re working around the house and some guy comes on television and says, ‘Six thousand people were killed in an explosion today..’ And you say, ‘Where? Where?’ And he says, ‘In Pakistan.’ And you say, ‘Ah, fuck Pakistan! Too far away to be any fun!’ But if he says that it happened in your hometown, you’ll say, ‘Woah! Hot shit! C’mon, Dave, let’s go look at the bodies! Let’s go look at the bodies!’ I love bad news! I LOVE bad news! Hey, the more bad news there is, the faster this system collapses. Fine by me! Fine by me!”
