Fear in the Media
A personal encounter that I had with a piece of media that scared me, and continues to scare me is the news. Every day, since I was in kindergarten my mom would wake me up an hour and half before we had to be at work and school, and we would watch the news together; it became our routine. This early encounter with news at a young age made me very insightful as a child. I was able to share with the class if the teacher ever mentioned what was happening in the news. Upon entering high school however, I started to notice a trend on the news channel we watched. They only seemed to be reporting on issues that involved murder, homicide, war, or political turmoil. This started to depress me that our country is obsessed with reporting on these issues. There did not seem to be anything positive or upbeat in the news. For this reason, I stopped watching the news because I could not handle all the death that the media was portraying. A very specific example of a story reported that scared me and probably changed my way of thinking forever was the Trayvon Martin shooting that happened in 2012. I started to really think about what it meant to be a person of color in the United States because of the way the media portrayed the story. Before and after this historical shooting, several other cases similar to this one occurred.
News was created to mass produce and inform the public on current events. I would say that news and all the different media outlets we have like newspaper, television, and radio have advanced and give us more opportunity to soak in the information being sold to us. News can be a great asset to human life, but also present many issues of ethicality at the same time.
