In chapter 3 they talk about how one powerful force that constructs reality is media and the news. I’m in an intro to journalism class right now and one major thing we discussed was news consumer’s common mistake of thinking things in the news are usual occurrences. This can lead to readers’ unintentionally fabricating epidemics or new commonplaces.
The news often shapes reality accidentally or intentionally in a way where people think what’s being reported on is the norm (For example: avoiding and labeling a neighborhood where a murder happened as dangerous, solely after learning of the murder in the news) but they don’t step back and realize a major, if not the main, reason it’s probably in the news is because it’s novelty or unusual. Consumers don’t always consider that maybe the murder was in the news because the area isn’t known for high-crime, making murders there unusual or unlikely.
To go one step further one should question why they even deem certain places riskier than others based only off the news. If crime is common somewhere, reporters most likely wouldn’t do a report on a specific murder or burglary case there because of its location; the only reason there’d be coverage would be for some novelty aspect or simply to enforce a story that’s specifically about the crime in that area, in which case there wouldn’t be an illegitimate assumption of high crime because it’d be specifically said that there’s crime there.
This issue of assumption strengthens the idea that reality is perception. People start believing an area is dangerous from how they perceived the news. That is their reality now. Then, even if initially statistics don’t support high crime rates, the once false assumption could lead to it actually becoming a more dangerous area from its new reputation (self-fulfilling prophecy?).
An additional thing to consider is the possibility that when media in general, not just the news, gets a lot of attention from a story or situation, the media source assumes that type of thing is what people like to hear and/or what will get their ratings and popularity up. They may start to seek out successions of it to gain/maintain their popularity. The explosion of similar situations or cases coming from the media then makes them seem more common, hence fabricated epidemics.
This is a test of your comment feature.
ReplyDelete