As I have come to learn, I am a very uninformed citizen. I am not a consumer of news. I don't read the newspaper, either local or national. The only time I have the news channel on is when there is a football game on to watch. The only "news" I consume is from my social media feeds. The two main social media sites that I get news from are Facebook and Tumblr. A lot of my friends on Facebook are very politically opinionated, and most of what they post is incredibly biased. The same thing is true for the "news" I get from Tumblr. The people on Tumblr are also very biased, so I can't trust everything I read on there.
I was shown a list of current events and was asked to rank them in order of what I thought was most important at this point in time. My list went police brutality, because of the recent happenings in Ferguson; climate change, because I saw a thing about a huge march that went on in New York City; gay marriage; terrorism; abortion rights; poverty; health care; and then unemployment.
After looking at various websites, I found out just how little I know about current events. The actual list of important things that were happening was terrorism, which showed up as the headline of every online news source I saw; ebola, Hillary Clinton, and then climate change. I didn't even know that Hillary Clinton was in the news recently. I had heard of some cases of people dying in Africa from ebola and that the CDC had allowed some doctors to re-enter the states that tested positive for ebola. All of which may not be true, it's just what I seem to remember about it. I have heard about ISIS in the current events, but all that I had heard was that they had captured and executed some reporters. They might not have even been reporters, it's also just what I seem to remember. I had no idea that the US was intervening over there.
This was an interesting exercise for me to do. I'm surprised at how little I know about, even though I don't make it a habit of following the news.
I am in the same position as you. I am not a huge consumer of news and I get my news from somewhat unreliable sources. With your example of ranking the most important current events, I had the same difficulties. However, I have learned that when it comes to the news, you have to consider agenda setting and framing. The press can filter and shape stories in the media to make certain stories seem more important. This is important to know whenever audiences do read or watch the news.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with the above comment about agenda setting and framing. Even in your post, you say you found out you were wrong about what's most important, but really all that happened was you saw what is featured most on the front page. The news media features certain things more often and more prominently in order to tell us what should be most important to us. But it's not necessarily their right to choose. I understand what you mean because we should all be informed citizens about what's happening, and I can completely relate because I don't feel like the most informed news consumer either. But if the issue that's most important to you is police brutality, that's not necessarily wrong just because it feels like that's what the news media is telling you.
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