Newsweek columnist George Will has a pretty good piece this week on declining standards of decency. He manages to tie together Larry Craig and Alberto Gonzales, drawing in a Ken Burns documentary for kicks.
But he closes by bringing in Miss Teen South Carolina's rambling (posted to YouTube if you missed it last week).
Will writes:
- Last week, there was nationwide merriment at the expense of an 18-year-old participant in a South Carolina beauty pageant. Asked a question about why many Americans might lack elementary knowledge about the world, she got lost in syntactical tangles and spoke nonsense. Although there was not a shred of news value in it, Fox News and CNN played the tape of her mortification, and by last Friday YouTube's presentation of it had generated more than 10 million hits. The casual cruelty of publicizing her discomfort, and the widespread entertainment pleasure derived from it, is evidence that standards of decency are evolving in the wrong direction.
Do you agree with Will? Does it lack news value? Is it OK to watch it but not OK for FoxNews and CNN to cover everyone watching it? (Can you find the United States on a map?)
We'll talk about communication values Monday. What makes a story a story? Why do people connect with advertising? Research gives us some clues ...
5 comments:
I feel bad for the girl. Does she stick her foot in her mouth and become the very essence of what she is trying to lament? Yes. But is that newsworthy? I don't think so. There are so many more problems in the world for Americans to care about than whether or not a teenage girl can eloquently describe the problems with American's education system in 15 seconds. Could you? Give her a break and turn on NPR instead.
Anything that has garnered 10 million hits on YouTube is newsworthy - even if it is as "shallow news" like a horrible/hilarious answer from a beauty pageant. Now, I realize that those hits are partly the result of the media, but not entirely. I have to say, I think it is newsworthy, though we may not want to admit it because by admitting it, we are making a statement about what Americans find important. Sorry to ramble... :)
It has entertainment value. By itself, it has no news value. If it were part of a larger story about education, appearance, success or decency, for example, it would be newsworthy.
I do think that this is newsworthy by the standards that we set as viewers. The news is becoming more and more entertainment based because that is what we are unintentionally asking of it. I don't think it should be considered hard news, but it is still news.
"Miss South Carolina" is hilarious but sad at the same time. I believe the clip represents some Americans' ignorance about current issues in Iraq and abroad. I would hope that mass responses of "she's so dumb" indicate that the general public knows far more about current events but I am afraid that this is not the case. While many laugh at SC's obvliviousness, I believe that their own understanding of "the Iraq" and conditions in Africa are substandard at best.
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