In the increasingly interconnected information (and communications if we listen to Raboy) societies, there more pressure than ever on the media to provide news for the public interest. There is so much information out there to consume today that it is impossible to take it all in and we rely on news outlets to curate much of our information for us. Siochru and Girard discuss, in general terms, how governments can create legislation to control the media in this regard, but in doing so, we run the risk of imposing a single view of society and creating censorship. So again, much of the determination as to what is newsworthy comes down to what the news outlets determine is "news worthy."
The problem with relying to heavily on the news media for these determinations is that they have an obligation to sell advertising time. They are therefore concerned with ratings, or more specifically, providing the public with the information they are interested in.
On Monday night, Brian Williams, host of the NBC Nightly News was on Letterman promoting his new show and during their interview, they started talking about Amanda Knox. For those out there who do not consume news from any major source, Amanda Knox is a young woman from Seattle who was convicted of killing Meredith Kurcher, a 21 year old British exchange student, in Italy four years ago. For whatever reason, this story captured the public imagination and interested reached its pinnacle on Monday when Amanda Knox's conviction was overturned, she was released and allowed to return home to the United States.
During the interview with Williams, Letterman asked the news anchor about this story and noted how it was a leading story on the major networks, trumping news about the protests on Wall Street, President Obama's job creation proposal, and the Republican primary campaign. Brian Williams acknowledged that he learned from one of his predecessors, Tom Brokaw, that the most important part of a good newscast is to balance what is in the public interest with what the public is interested in. (Here is the link to the interview. Unfortunately, there is no way to get the specific segment of the show from the CBS website, but the interview with Williams is in the third segment)
Williams acknowledges that it is difficult to ignore how, during a time when one in ten Americans is unemployed, the media is focusing so intently on the fate of one woman who's future will have almost no impact on the overwhelming majority of the country, but he has an obligation to the viewer.
With that in mind, I'm posing a series of open questions: is this an argument for increased regulation of the news media? Should we have more stringent rules on what networks provide in their newscasts? In the United States, we have laws requiring networks to provide a certain amount of programming in the public interest every day, do human interest stories like Amanda Knox's qualify? Or is this yet another reason for individuals to take ownership of the curating their own news?
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