A MEDIA DRIVEN BY SENSATIONALISM

By David Woodbury 

Australia has just passed through a bush fire season the like of which we have never known. Even large cities like Sydney that may be relatively untouched by the actual bush fires have had their air quality drastically impacted by the smoke that lingered for weeks. Following hard on the heels of the bush fires the outbreak of the COVID 19 virus has rocked the world. One gets the feeling that these events are fodder for a media that immediately goes into overdrive with sensational reporting. 

It may well be that the media outlets compete to see who can publish the most sensational headline and each headline has to be more sensational than the previous day. There is a degree of irresponsibility on the part of the media as to the impact this sort of sensational reporting has on the general public. 

Words like disaster, crisis, emergency, catastrophic are bandied about with a frequency that is mind-boggling to the extent that they are beginning to lose their impact and the general public is becoming desensitised. The old fable of the little boy who cried wolf tells us that continued level of sensationalism will eventually desensitise us. Consequently, when the time comes that the general public should be paying attention, they are so swamped by sensationalism that they may well be tuned out and deaf to an important message. 

It is not that I want to lessen the importance of the current COVID 19 virus but it is already evident that much of the population has been whipped into a frenzy of panic buying by a constant media barrage. Consequently, we are seeing empty shelves in both food and medical supplies. Such panic buying, particularly in the area of medical supplies, may well leave a shortage of necessary material that health professionals need to counter an epidemic. As a result panic buying may help to accelerate the spread of the virus. 

Media outlets must bear a high degree of responsibility for the present public panic and perhaps it is timely that the Australian public looks closely at the ethics of media companies and the accuracy and balance with which they report the news. 

One wonders about the ethics and integrity of media outlets and even a cursory look at current reporting has examples of over-sensationalism, e.g.; one TV channel will report: “Channel ## has an exclusive report on blah, blah, blah”. Chances are that if you change channels you will get the same exclusive report from a rival channel, complete with exactly identical video clips. It must be glaringly obvious to media producers that their content is not, and never was, exclusive. 

The sad fact is that Australia is not well served with a well-balanced and ethical media mix. Regardless of all the protestations we get from media companies and the ABC, we have this unsettling feeling that a lot of what is being fed to us is slanted to suit political or business interests. In the case of the ABC, the national broadcaster, there is more than a sneaking suspicion that a leftist agenda is at play.  

ABC newsreader James Dibble

When I reflect back to my younger days when James Dibble read the evening news, the ABC was a highly respected and balanced organisation and if it was reported by their news teams, you felt you could rely on their integrity and ethics. Today, when you watch an ABC current affairs program there is an unsettling suspicion that you might need to be a little more critical of what is being fed to you. 

One cannot ignore the impact of the Internet and social media in this scenario and you might suspect that at times reporters are drawing on social media for some of their material. Unfortunately, social media is a mine of misinformation and fake news. Whenever someone quotes a report from social media my first question is: who is saying this and is the source trustworthy and ethical? 

As I write this news is to hand that Australian Associated Press (AAP) will close on June 26 this year. AAP is an Independent news service used by most media organisation in Australia. Misha Ketchell,  Editor & Executive Director of The Conversation, commenting on the closure writes: Now all this careful work will stop, another victim of the new world created by Facebook and Google in which attention is all that matters and truth is a virtue sometimes paid in lip service but never dollars. 

Sadly, we have to realise that we live in an age where word spin and outright lies are part and parcel of our information currency. The reality is that we have to become very astute, wise and discerning about what we hear and see from all media sources, professional and otherwise. It is not necessarily true or authentic because it appears on our TV screens, electronic devices or printed matter.