It’s really taken me a while to truly appreciate how it works and I’ve come to the conclusion that it can almost be compared to keyword research. First of all the headlines of the day are usually announced by pretty looking people that in most case don’t really possess any journalistic skills - at least none that I would consider being necessary to be labeled a true investigative journalist.
Instead what we have is something that I believe is controlled mostly by keywords and how many hits these will receive. It’s very much like blogging if you think about it. I’ve written over a 100 blog posts and I think and I’ve experimented with this myself. Recently I was on my night shift job and I was watching Fox News and I noticed that the host of the “Red Eye” show looked like he had lost a knife fight. So as an experiment I posted this information on my blog immediately. Guess what - to this day it’s the highest ranking post on my blog in terms of page views it has received. Another post where I picked a headline that I was guessing would do well is the article where I criticized Dunkin Donuts for their ignorant approach towards beverage names. Not surprisingly that’s also one of the post I got the most comments on. The point I’m getting it is the fact that everyone, even the journalists and bloggers are somewhere trying to make money and if you want to have a blog for example that gets a few hundred thousands hit just pick topics you know everyone is talking about, items that are in the news.
What it boils down to is that the media just picks up any garbage that they can find and know people will watch. Even big sites such as the Huffington Post can be accused of this. Even on their site you will find the trash boulevard garbage, but of course with more meaningful commentary on the journalistic side of things. I don’t really blame businesses for trying to make money, it’s just the fact that they are the main propagating factor when it comes to all the media bullshit we have to whitness. With all the trash that’s out there one would think that “normal” might even have a market share. I know I’ve written about this time and time again but until I see some serious change I can’t help but to write on it again. I even called into a local radion show because I wanted to know why they were reporting garbage and taking calls on Rev. Right instead of focusing more on the fact that we’re in a War, have hundreds of thousands of Veterans that aren’t getting the care they deserve and the radio talk show host told me that they tried it. By tried I mean they tried covering the issues that should be important to the local community and on a national level and I was told that nobody calls, the show is pretty much dead. Obviously that’s not good for advertisers so it all comes down to one thing again - until profits are taken out of the news business, all we will get our regurgitated headlines, as real investigative journalism costs to much and doesn’t bring back enough money in terms of viewership.
This article was written by Arno - Author's Website
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