Vincent Ferrer/The Mirror
A decision in Germany this month can help determine your future employment. Our next president may have no respect for women. The governor of Connecticut, some say, is driving up our tuition.
Despite all of this, many students nationwide and here on campus know a lot more about a single celebrity divorce (among the hundreds occurring everyday nationwide) than the listed critical news happenings.
Just read the article last week by Mary Kate McCormick when she writes, “the majority of Fairfield students interviewed knew little about Gadhafi, or the Libyan Civil War.”
While interviewing for this article, I met one student who could not name a single 2012 presidential candidate.
Why is that? Why are so many people ignorant of relevant news while maintaining an acute interest in the benign happenings of Hollywood?
Accessibility to both types of news is abundant. Just ask anyone who gets CNN breaking news updates on their phone or who does not go an hour without checking the ESPN BottomLine.
All kinds of news can reach us easily, and we should be able to understand it all. Right? Most fundamental concepts needed to understand what CNN has to say are taught early on in school.
However, news has gotten complicated in today’s age. The decisions that steer people from paying attention to serious news are not made necessarily by the consumer.
“Knowledge of the Dodd-Frank financial legislation in place of Kate Middleton’s wardrobe or Tom Brady’s passing statistics would entail a lot more work,” said Dr. Michael Serazio, an assistant professor in Fairfield University’s Communications Department. “The question is: how can journalism continue to format its coverage of critical issues and events so as to draw in new audiences and attention … even if the subjects are complicated and challenging?”
It could be argued that Justin Bieber’s love life is a bit involved, and maybe raising the debt ceiling is not as clear-cut compared to the classic ‘Reagan Shot’ news stories of generations past. However, it is not just the general public’s difficulty in grasping content or the media’s lack of comprehensive presentation that has made serious news less popular among many in the student crowd.
For Benafsha Juyia ’14, not knowing what was said on the front page of today’s New York Times is a choice. “People don’t care about who runs the country because the country is always going to have issues,” she said. “The day-to-day doesn’t matter.”
Rev. James Mayzik S.J., Director of the Media Center, considers the favoring of benign news to be more than a trend in young people. “Just this morning on Good Morning America they talked about Kim Kardashian’s failed marriage. I said, ‘Why is this news?’ It’s the same reason why people go to see dumb movies: to escape reality. Our culture does not want to deal with real things,” he said.
In that light, it seems that the news media is already beginning to give up on the struggle discussed by Serazio. And that, ultimately, is what Serazio says should make us concerned.
But does this mean that cultures that keep in tune with reality are better off than ours? Would we be happier if the news industry made us come to terms with reality?
I guess until the answer comes, a middle path should be found: news media that speaks the truth without making us depressed.
Luckily, we have countless media outlets in America that do already make light of real issues, such The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Mirror’s very own cartoons by Vin Ferrer.
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