In seeing that tonight, I can't help but think about a particular day last year when a college student committed suicide in Las Condes. Someone had taken pictures from their cell phone and sent them in to all of the news channels. Fine. That always happens. But for 20 minutes, every channel flashed the 3 or 4 pictures the person took of this person on their balcony, climbing over their balcony, and then the worst, in the air.
I'm not saying at all that other countries wouldn't do the same, but I would hope that it wouldn't be for that long or at least that it wouldn't be accompanied by the "reporting" that went on whilst these pictures were being shown. It was just chatter. Meaningless speculations about why this person might have done this and what they think the family and friends might be feeling. meanwhile, they were not only being disrespectful to those family members and friend affected by this death, but they were also not doing their jobs. I'm sorry, but that is not journalism. I know that news anchors in the United States are very frequently criticized for this same thing so I'm not saying it's just Chile. I think the shootings at Virginia Tech prove that the most. Instead of good journalism, famous faces walked around shoving their microphones in students' faces asking them, "how do you feel?" and "I bet your sad about what happened and it was scary. What do you have to say?". I think that type of "interviewing" really demonstrates a lack of understanding and certainly a lack of professionalism.
Ok, enough complaints for a while....
2 comments:
you're totally right about the chilean news...they suck big time...i think they do 0 cover of the international news...i think that this domesticness on the news is bad for the people..they know very little about the things happening in this world..they tend to blame on national reasons for all the problems happening here (like the fuel prices)..keepin a veri isolated mind in the country
saludos
How many "informes especiales" I have seen about crime in el centro! I mean yes, there's lots of pickpocketing...but how many times can we use the same footage of a guy stealing a cell phone? And last year, we kept having reports of femicidio. Yes, obviously if a woman is killed by her husband/boyfriend then that's news, but they kept just saying how many women had been killed in this way so far during 2007 (got up into the low 50s I believe) without ever mentioning if this was more or less than 2006. The focus was only on making it sound like an epidemic without giving viewers the background to see for themselves whether these statistics were in fact better or worse comparatively.
You didn't mention that futbol coverage - both national and international! - takes up a good 20 minutes of the hour-long news. I'd break it down as 18 minutes Chilean news, 18 minutes "strike fear into the hearts of the people", and 20 minutes of soccer, with the remaining 4 minutes divided between other sports and international news.
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