When I was working in TV News, people would always ask me why we chose to cover a specific story or not cover something they thought was relevant. My answer was and continues to be: News is subjective. The people charged with making decisions about news coverage on a daily basis select the stories based on what they THINK the majority of their viewers would be interested in. There are other factors as well but that's not really relevant to this particular blog post.
The picture on the left represents a group of young men who just made history. No, their basketball team didn't go undefeated. This group from Urban Prep Academy made history by becoming the first senior class at Chicago's only public all-male, all-African-American high school to be accepted to four-year colleges. ALL 107 of the seniors earned spots at 72 schools across the nation.
Quite an impressive story when you consider that the overall high school drop out rate among young black men is at an all-time high.
My question is, did you hear about it on the news or did you read about it as I did in an email that was forwarded to me by a friend? Not even Oprah, who broadcasts from the Windy City has picked up the torch for these young men.
This is another example of how the media picks and chooses what they deem as news and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that these young men may not live in your area.
Positive news can come from anywhere, wouldn't you agree?
3 comments:
You're not likely to get many comments from your former colleagues on this post, Bev. It is a rare occurrence that an industry as warped as our current mass media would ever admit to their blatant bias.
Beverly, we really need more of these heartwarming inspiring stories in our lives. I rarely listen to the news.
use to love when Walter Cronkite was on the tele, because he always ended with "May the Good News Be Yours." At least I think it was Cronkite (it was so long ago).
I so agree with that... where has all the good news gone? It seems to me that people thrive on negative news and that is why the media feeds it to them.
One day this may change, but I fear it won't be in my lifetime.
Have a fantastic day and thank you for spreading the good news. I am so proud of these guys!
Have a great day... and then some.
Heidi
I work in the education sector and struggle with this all the time. I finally decided to develop a "Good News" blog last year for our system of schools. I share posts from this blog with our politicians, member organizations and the media (on a one by one basis - no mass news releases).
What I to realize was that our champions (our parents, teachers, students, system supporters) needed some assistance in getting up to speed on all the good things happening in our system. So I decided that if the media thought our good news stories were too boring we would just promote them ourselves using the wonderful power of the Internet (and social media).
This initiative is still new but we're receiving excellent feedback from all parts of the sector, even the media and especially our politicians.
What you're doing Bev is great - keep spreading the good news in anyway that you can. I'm reading your story about these young men and spreading the word as well.
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