Media Attention: priorities off?

Hi guys... as some of you might've seen/read in the news earlier this week, Sen. Patrick Kennedy broke into an outburst at the House debate earlier this week about how the media no longer spends any time covering the war despite all the sacrifices being made, and instead focuses on petty scandals in politics and Hollywood. Back in India the recent movie Rann also covered similar territory, telling us how news channels sensationalize the truth for the sake of TRPs. So, I was hoping to start up an informative discussion/debate of any issues of interest that are related to journalism practices and priorities today. If you guys come up with other topics under this category they would be welcome here, to start off here's an idea: Is it more important for news channels to show us the bitter truth about ongoing wars, human rights crises, etc., or do they rightly focus on lighter celeb-related topics like SRK, Tiger Woods, etc because reality is harsh enough and we could use the entertainment?

Good topic 👏

I had something similar some days back on DM. So may question will be "Does The media manipulate it's viewers? If so, then can we trust what we're reading or listening or seeing?"

Originally posted by: debayon

Good topic 👏

I had something similar some days back on DM. So may question will be "Does The media manipulate it's viewers? If so, then can we trust what we're reading or listening or seeing?"

Thanks for liking! In response to your questions, yes I believe the media manipulates its viewers - we have different news networks that are openly partisan when it comes to political preferences and deliver their stories without trying to ignore this bias. Thus the viewers can be swayed in either direction if they don't try to balance out their perspective with other sources of news. So, no, we can't trust what we read/watch because based on their business interests, they flip-flop on what they're trying to tell us anyway!