As I sat in the living room of my apartment the other day, I was spending my time doing what any other diligent college student does in their free time: watching TV.
Though a fair amount of my television viewing is spent watching sports and inappropriate comedy, I try hard to keep up on my political and world news through various news networks.
Although many news networks like Fox News and MSNBC have been criticized for perceived “biases” towards one political affiliation over another in their reporting, I still find it important to at least stay up on what is going on in the world.
So as I sit on the couch scanning the 95 channels that I don’t watch, I finally stop on CNN to see what is going on in the news world.
While I see headlines scrolling across the bottom about mass flooding in Pakistan and mass murders in Africa, the top headlines of the day include Paris Hilton getting busted for cocaine and Lindsay Lohan getting out of rehab.
As so-called “experts” debate where Paris Hilton’s career will go from here for a half hour, I look over to one of my roommates and we simultaneously say, “How is this the top news story of the day?”
While people are being murdered and countries are suffering natural disasters left and right, the media decides that spoiled socialites getting in trouble is what we need to hear about.
Even though you can place the blame on the media for what they decide to cover, the blame ultimately comes back to us.
You can place the fault with the news media for running the stories, but when more people are clamoring to hear about who is getting divorced in Hollywood or which Jersey Shore star is giving a nickname to a body part now, the media is just giving the consumers what they want.
So if anything is going to change, it all starts with the people watching the news. Though I’m not saying that we should eliminate all forms of celebrity news, I do believe that our priorities should be rearranged a bit.
Although Brad and Angelina might be getting divorced, there are real events in the world that are affecting people and also affecting your everyday life.
So the next time your turn on the news, hopefully you take the time to pay attention to the real news that is happening. If we don’t pay attention to the real news, then there might as well be no news at all. n