On Watching the News

As a grade A procrastinator, I made the mistake of waiting until the last minute to watch some news programs. This is really a mistake today because of the passing of Whitney Houston last night. That is all the news is focusing on, so I didn't get a full affect of how the news really reports and on what topics. Also, I don't think Hall's "Work of Representation" applied as much to what I saw. I do not usually watch the news. I know how important it is to get information about the world and also the local community, but the news just bores me and I find most of the stories misleading or fluff pieces. I probably feel that way because that's essentially all the news is.

For this blog assignment, I decided that I wanted to check out three different sources of news. I looked at Fox News, CNN, and then local news reports to see how their stories and reporting differed. I discovered what I had forgotten to be true since the death of Michael Jackson in 2009: celebrity, especially celebrity deaths, triumph all. Both Fox News and CNN were filled with stories of Houston's death and how that would be affecting the Grammy Awards. I found myself sitting and waiting for the real news to be reported on. Don't get me wrong, I find the passing of Houston extremely upsetting. She has had a very troubled past decade or so, maybe even longer, but she was an amazing talent and there's no denying that. However, I didn't feel it was appropriate for so much of a show to be focused on this one story, when literally every other station I turned on had stories about it also.

I will give Fox News credit, which it kills me to do because I really really hate Fox News, that they at least did more coverage of other events and news topics than CNN did, during my time watching both stations. Fox News at least also talked about the president's mandate that health insurance providers for companies offer birth control coverage for employees. Also, they discussed the Republican GOP race. These topics made sense for Fox News, but I was actually shocked at how unbiased the reporting was. I was expecting the stories to completely be right-sided and minded, but the stories were more just told. I realized that it's because I was watching the coverage of news, rather than the specialized news programmers hosted by the likes of Bill O'Reilly, that are at the base of my hatred for Fox News.

The only place I found some distance from the death of Whitney Houston were the local news programs. Yes, her death was clearly covered, but I got to see stories that had no connection to her at all, also. I did notice, though, that there was a level of fear built into the stories on the local news. For example, a big topic of interest on every local station I turned on was of the weather. It is going to be extremely cold in these upcoming days, and the meteorologists and news anchors were making sure the audience was completely aware of that. Multiple stories in each program revolved around the upcoming cold. It honestly made me nervous about how cold it was going to be and what that's going to mean for the environment and everything that the weather has been switching so frequently.

Other than this, though, the main focus was on Whitney Houston. I think that I didn't notice how much this kind of news gets in the way of other stories because when Michael Jackson passed away, I was very invested in what had happened, since I am a bigger fan of his than Whitney's. Also, it makes me think about the fact that this death gives the news yet another excuse to not cover footage of the war, or on different problems happening all around the world. I feel like celebrity ultimately comes first, over so many topics in this country. As others have discussed in their blogs before, we are far more fascinated by the lives of the rich and famous than those in need or similar to ourselves. And I really think that we need to readjust that.

Also, as a way of trying to look at it through Hall's work, I guess we could say that the media constructs the portrayal of the celebrity who has passed away. The news could be saying all they wanted before Houston died about her drug abuse and toxic lifestyle, but after she died, the story could either be twisted to make her the poster child for what drugs will do to ones life (even if drugs had nothing to do with the death, we won't know for another six to eight weeks), or they could make her out to be a complete hero for the music industry, which seems to be what they're doing. It is all about how the media wants to twist and present the story.