If it bleeds, it leads. We all know this tale too well. The top stories anywhere always seem to be related to death, crime and/or destruction. Now if the president of the United States is assassinated, that needs to be the top story, there's no question. But let's take a different example. We all remember Anna Nicole Smith's death, because the story was everywhere. The worst may have been CNN, which prides itself on its political coverage. CNN treated this story with about as much coverage as this year's primaries. What did Anna Nicole Smith do for society? She was an entertainer, a model and a TV personality. That's certainly not worth weeks of discussion after her death. What's more is that there was nothing to discuss. There was very little to the story to begin with, and the media blew it out of proportion.
I'm getting at the fact that the media need to rethink the way they value stories. A man may save a boy's life, and often that story is buried in the inside pages of a daily newspaper or even completely left out of a newscast. In a world full of problems, there are plenty of stories out there of success, of people helping each other. It's there that the art of storytelling thrives, on telling stories of people. There's no art in obsessing over the death of a model. Journalists must make the choice to do what's right instead of what's easy.
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