How can I be Happy and have fun when the world around me is showing more signs of sadness and miseries in a world which I believe was full of joy and laugh. This is a question which most of us ask ourselves every morning and during the day whenever we turn towards learning latest happening around the globe by reading or watching or listening to NEWS.
Over the period of time, has the social meaning of the word "News" changed? Or, is it we the audience at the other end of such News who have changed.
Is it the media or we the people? Who should be held responsible for the degradation in quality of news content while the quantity of the News Content is exponentially increasing.
To my understanding there are few factors behind this huge spectrum of creation and distribution of NEWS:
1. Emotional Behaviour: Human are emotional animals but lets be honest, we respond more promptly to a sad emotion than to a joyfull moment.
A happy moment is more often neglected and mis-interpreted as "everything is normal". In order to get audience attention, the news also follow the same rule and has to be emotionally charged enough to be reported.
2. Scarcity of a 24 hour clock based measureable entity called "Time":
Almost 50 percent of the world's population face scarcity of basic human needs. At the same time there is an entity calld "Time" which in the new modern world every human on this planet feels short off through out his lifetime. Due to this high scarcity of "time" in a 24 hour day the human expectation now demands for fast response. This acts as a catalyst to transform news to be Breaked rather than to be reported. It can be well described as a relay race in which the runner, here reporters, have to run the first half (Collect and Edit) as quick as possible so as to hand-over the half cooked news baton to the distribution media, who will then take it to the finish line with the only goal to be the first to enter the stadium with the news-baton to be greeted by all spectators eagerly waiting to see someone crossing that finish line. First stays the Best
3. Evolution: Humans are said to evolve over time, and the urge to develop and explore New things has always been a priority for the human race. With this thought even the News Content gets explored for freshness and any sort of information which can be turned into an excitement potentially becomes News.
4. Social cause to a For Profit Institution:
News collection, reporting and distribution is now turned into a profit making business supported by Advertisment campaign from large multi million dollars business houses, firms. In order to achieve the target goals on profitability which mainly comes from these Advertisement revenues, the news has become a product than an information-message.
Its time we think back and take a look on what we expect from NEWS and how do we get that and act towards keeping News as a responsible, noble, authentic medium of passing information.
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