Reliable news source or profit driven corporation?

Every morning around kitchens across America, adults brew their morning coffee and sit down to read the daily newspaper. While reading the newspaper is occasionally dubbed as a dying art form, an increasing fad in current event junkies is online news sources.

As most can agree, it’s not exactly challenging to discover trends within news networks; most viewers can deduct that MSNBC and CNN are liberal networks, while Fox News is conservative. Although media bias is a relevant issue, perhaps an equally problematic concern is the reality that news resources are becoming an entertainment outlet designed to generate profit.

Before the Internet began to take off, ABC, CBS, and NBC were the main three television networks that presented news in a way that would attach credibility to their name. Fast-forward to the current day, and the definition of reliability in the media have quickly blurred.

Marc Gunther with Nieman Reports implies that, “The high frequency of coverage on certain events such as the Ebola scare in 2014 further the notion that sources such as CNN are fear-mongering networks designed to create anxiety in the viewer, causing them to return for later updates.

This effect is called infotainment. This is defined simply as media outlets that resort to incorporating lighthearted presentations, human interest stories, and emotionally-tinged or charged language into newscast to gain ratings.

Infotainment, once defined, is easily identifiable in several outlets. One of easiest examples to mention is the polarization of types of stories in the news.

The polarization of news stories in every outlet can be laughable; The drastic differences of news stories is quite unbalanced; it seems for every 10 sad stories about violence there is only one happy story, and often times the happy story is not even relevant to news.

Some of CNN’s top news stories on their website consists of the Paris attacks, ISIS, the 2016 presidential election, and last but not least, 10 adorable Christmas puppies to warm your day. As cute as those 10 puppies may be, the frequency of lighthearted, relevant news stories is desperately needed. While frightening events occur in the world, relevant light stories need to be covered more frequently. For example, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has pledged to donate $45 billion to charity.

Rather than focusing on fear-mongering stories, news sources need to ensure that they are presenting the information in a timely, relevant, and balanced manner for the sake of merit, not for profit. American’s view the world through their news outlets, and the bias of these outlets are causing an anxious America.