RE: Does the Media run the world ?

I must say that CNN seem to have been improving recently but
still lag behind the BBC in the latters documentaries that
often try to look at both sides of a story rather than just
choosing and sticking to the party line.

The problem with documentaries is that they are by definition too late. The amount of research and work involved into making a proper, decent, well-put, interesting and informative documentary makes them not only expensive (only few channels are willing to spend money on them, and even if so hardly do proper research – CNN documentaries are hardly more than dossiers of the very same CNN whereas the BBC uses archive footage only to illustrate the ‘new’ work of the documentary team) but also that it takes a lot of time before they are finished. The actual issue is by then old news – including the decisions made on that old, and sometimes inaccurate or spindoctered or biased news.

Yes, or the fact that a boring story with good video footage
will always beat a good story with no video footage when it
comes to reading news stories on the TV news.

I hated working for television. I was absolutely disgusted by that attitude.

Oh, and a small correction on the news-value formula above: the number of deaths in an event can just as well be the (usually highly inflated) presumed number of deaths. After all, by September 12th we all were told that at least 10.000 people had died in the Twin Towers…

Oh, and revolting as the act was: the 9/11 attacks were schoolbook media events orchestrated by a party in conflict. I can imagine the media/PR/spin doctors in the US government were actually jealous about the media-affectionate way especially the NY attacks were made. Second strike long enough after the first to make sure enough cameras were around (something of which you can be sure of in NY), a target which is not just emotionally important to the US but to the rest of the world as well (at least here in Europe NY was considered to be something ‘special’ even amongst those who don’t like the USA), beautiful weather to make some of the most stunning disaster-photography ever…

RE: Does the Media run the world ?

does the media run the world ? Could we live without the
media (news reports, newspapers, radio tv etc). Just think,
no more…”today umpteen people where killed in aircrash,
more died in a sandstorm, petrol prices going up, more
people died at a football match, global warming on the
increase and Eastenders will be transmitted every night for
two hours, Good evening”…(why do they always say “good
evening”….I’d hate to be around if they ever say “bad
evening”.)

There’s plenty of stuff going on in the world you don’t hear about – or do you really think the riots in Nigeria are something completely new? No, they are a regular occurance yet the combination with the Miss World-contest gives it a different, more saucy, easier comprehendible angle, and conveniently Western press is more present for such an event.
No matter what people think of ‘the media’, most news-bringing organisations are nowadays very much market-oriented. News is written, gathered, compiled and edited less and less by journalistic standards (subjective as these might be), but more and more by public-consumption-demands-standards.

I’m sure that if the media was shutdown, for say a
week, the world would get a breather, most of the conflicts
would reduce because no-one is getting to hear about them
and so fuel the fires.

Uh… that’s a bit dumb reasoning, don’t you think? People in a far away country giving up their local conflict because you can no longer hear about it on CNN? Please give me a break! There are so many conflicts on the world, plenty of which are extremely brutal, with hardly any news coverage. If the media was shut down for a week the world would indeed get a breather, but only a breath of fresh ignorant air. Conflicts existed before the media started reported on them (in fact, only one of the few properly covered conflicts in the entire history of war-journalism was covered according to journalistic standards and not a propaganda tool), there are plenty of conflicts without global media coverage, and you think that withdrawing journalists brings world peace? Get realistic here.
If you’re not informed about things, that doesn’t mean things don’t happen.

The media by its very nature and irrespective of what medium
it uses, basically incites our emotions…if you think about
it.

That is easy: people in general just want to hear news about subjects they can relate to. And if the people can relate to something, it’s likely they form an opinion concerning the news around that subject. So you get ‘interesting occurence’ + ‘topic i can relate to’, and this easily adds up to emotional involvement of the audience. This is of course even more so because people are often too lazy to think for themselves, and allow the media to form an opinion for them (the opinion and editorial pages of newspapers!). As such, the media does incite people’s emotions just because people ALLOW the media to do so. In fact, most people prefer a newspaper or media source because it is emotionally on par with that person’s preferences.

When there’s a cup final on for footy, all you get is
wall to wall reports about how good each team is, and who
the best players are, how they got there and mentions every
five minutes on the news.

That’s because the bulk of the audience wouldn’t accept the media to be critical here, and especially the avid football supporter wants to be confirmed how good it’s team is. Happens with other kinds of reporting as well – it took some time after the 2PGW before the true military value of the Patriot or BGM-109 was published. Equally, it was never reported in the British newspapers that with the Task Force sent out to retake the Falklands in 1982 there was a cargo load with 5000 bodybags…

This ‘pumps up’ those who are
supporters to the level that they feel / are invincible (or
so it seems to them at the time) and whichever side looses
get’s boo’d, bottles thrown etc etc followed by riots.

Sports riots have occured for centuries, long before the media came around. In the Roman era, there were massive riots concerning wagon races, in the 16th and 17th century concerning boxing matches… I don’t think it’s fair to blame the media for this, although it can be argued that the scale of rioting has become bigger (but so have the numbers of sports spectators).

why else do the countries where these events happen, have to
massivley increase the police presence to hopefully control
whats going to happen after the match. Tho losing side feel
robbed and are out for blood, the winning side so far up its
own *rs* that it cant help but ‘wave’ to the loosers.

The human tendency to find social acceptance in a social group, and obtaining group identity by rejecting other social groups. The simple US against THEM theme. The media can only support the views of such a group, but i don’t think it can form such groups (unless you’re talking interactive media like this forum where we have our own Keymags-web-community, but this requires extensive input from the audience and not from the media itself).

I’m not slagging off either the media nor those who work for
it (honestly !)…

Don’t worry, i don’t feel offended at all (i’m a journo)

…it just seems that unless something can be
sensationalised to get more punters reading, seeing, hearing
about, then its hardly worth bothering with and if it is, a
carefull bit of word use can change the overall effect as
presented to the public.

Unless it’s sensationalised and/or brought into connection with the audience’s more direct interest or close references, most people don’t care to read the news. It’s as simple as that. I posted a formula on this forum a while back, with a simple equation to calculate the news value of a certain event.

it went something like: NV = (V*gf / d) * Ca
NV = News Value
V = number of victims
gf = gross factor (a saucy death is better than a car crash)
d = distance from the audience to an event (a sunk ferry in Bangladesh won’t be of much interest in Western Europe, but a sunken ferry from Ostend to Dover is)
Ca = Constant education/interest factor for the particulair audience your medium is focusing at. The Independent has different standards regarding it’s audience as The Sun.

Hope this makes any sense to you.

RE: Top 5 music videos ever made!

‘Praise you’ by Fat Boy Slim was great, as was the Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’.

But what about ‘Love Missile F1-11’ from Sigue Sigue Sputnik?

RE: Canada to U.S.: Mind your own business, don’t tell us how to run our military; calls Bush a moro

If I were Chrétien, i wouldn´t spend too much on defense either. Especially not since he found out that Canadians make easy practice targets for US F-16s }>

RE: My favourite KLM aircraft

Nice pic – especially considering the circumstances over there. And finally an opportunity for me to ask if that paintjob makes any sense – has it flown as such, or was it an exam project for a bright career as an aircraft painter?

RE: Grand Prix Of Turkey

Treacherous weather conditions in Russia? Actually, it’s very predictable over there. But i have to agree with Jeuneturc that the worse the weather, the more enjoyable the race.

Are they going to build a track in Istanbul? That would be a shame – a streettrack like Monaco would be great, and certainly not as boring as yet another freshly built track without any atmosphere at all.

But it seems i won’t be watching much next seison… Schumacher’s still in, Spa is out… even my crystal ball fell asleep from boredom.

RE: HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Step 1:
Save the picture you scanned/ripped of the web/got somewhere in a location where you can find it. Not far away in some obscure subsubsubfolder hiddden in Win32, but on your desktop for example.

Step 2:
Open your outlook.

Step 3:
Compose an email.

Step 4:
In the bar above the email you’re composing, you’ll find a paperclip. Click that, and it will ask you which files to attach to the mail you are composing.

Step 5:
Click on the image/file you conveniently placed on your desktop, or try to find that impossibly misplaced image hidden in some obscure folder somewhere in the lower regions of your harddisk.

Step 6:
Send.

In Hotmail, you can somewhere choose to upload a file with your email as well, but i’m not an avid hotmail-user so perhaps someone else can help here.

RE: UN resolutions

Benjamin,

Giscard d’Estaing is not Mr. EU, even though he thinks so himself. Ny the way, might you ever interview him, ask him about how he celebrated christmas 1993 }> I don’t think he’ll ever join the celebrations in a UN compound again…