In the last two days, the local news has reported a guy getting arrested for hanging a dog by it's chain from a jungle jim in a kids park, and another guy getting arrested for driving nails into his dogs head (it lived, with brain damage) What the fuck?
People just keep getting crazier.
I HOPE THEY HANG BOTH GUYS! miss treat an animal, that's just plain sick!
Nahh .. ppl have always been that crazy/evil.Originally Posted by DigitalJay
Only now there's a 24/7 news cycle to fill up.
Ah yes, dead dog stories. Sometimes a dead dog story really isn't about the dog. Let me illustrate.
Years ago, I used to write for a gay newspaper in Toronto. I got an assignment that a dog a died in a local park. There had been a lot of hub-bub at the time between dog people and non-dog people fighting over how all the dogs would piss in the park and kill the grass. So, we initially thought the dead dog might have been the result of a doggie brou-ha-ha.
No. The dog was wearing a choke collar, it got it's lower jaw caught in it, they couldn't free the dog from its collar, and it died. End of story.
So I went back to my editor. There's no story. "Okay great, write it up and give me 500 words by Friday." Even Shakespeare with all his flowery language couldn't draw this scenario into a 500-word story. Back and forth I went with the editor, but she continued to demand a story, and then, even added a sidebar. She drove me nuts and I couldn't figure out what the deal was, but I wrote the story and it largely became a story about how dangerous choke collars were for dogs and what other options were available.
Six months later, I found out that she was getting heat from the publisher whose house bordered the "dead dog" park. She was being pressured to get the dog issue in the paper as much as possible because he was tired of listening to barking dogs all day. He hoped that if enough people bitched about dogs in that park that it would be declared a dog-free zone.
Dogs still pee and bark in that park on a daily basis.
Dzinerbear
Michael,
Thats not just true of dog stories
Most news stories being covered by the mass media today all have hidden agendas, whether they be private, personal or, more often than not political
Regards,
Lee
i'm not sure about the hidden agendas thing.
Regarding what Dzinerbear said.
One of our local stations here, has a tower on top of their studio owned by Clear Channel. The tower is rotting but CC won't fix it.
So the owner of the station had them do a 5 minute report on the whole thing because CC wouldn't budge and take the tower down before it colapses on top of the studio.
Of course all of media has an agenda, get your eyeballs so they can make money by having an emotional story like the dogs, to enrage the viewers and subsequently make them watch.
Then you have sweeps months with the most bizzare stories. One local station here has begun to regularly do religious stories and spiritual stuff like ghosts, angels and so on because it's so popular with viewers.
Even bloggers have agendas too
One thing I DO NOT MISS about America is the negative attention grabbing news to get ratings. When I first came to Oz and watched TV it was different, I didn't realize what it was at first... then it dawned on me.. there isn't a local news "newsflash" every other commercial telling you of something awful that happened, or something you should be afraid of and watch "News at 11" to find out what it is.
If nothing else, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE realize that 90% of the news on American TELEVISION is used to scare you into watching your local news broadcast, or scare you into feeling a certain way for a political agenda.
Notice how reading the news online, or in the paper, is different then watching your local news broadcast? You don't feel the anxiety, fear or emotions you do on local broadcast AND you get more of the whole story then on a 35 second newsbyte.
The reason you've seen animal cruelty stories two days in a row is because the first one got high ratings & that's what keeps your local news on air, so they repeated genre again to maintain the spike. It's the same reason you see police chase coverage live, bank robberies, black on white crime, etc. etc. My last partner of 5 years is an exec at the L.A. times, and before him I dated an on air news guy for 2 years (fox). As long as local news programs rely on advertising and ratings for income you will have sensational mind rotting spew thrown at you while the dirty deeds big advertisers do go uncovered for fear of income loss. Unfortunately cable news channels are now the rage so you can see where this is going.
Sorry for the rant. This is something I know the inner workings of and it's just wrong.
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