Sensational Journalism and Its Effects

1025 Words3 Pages

“If it Bleeds it Leads”

Nowadays the media have transformed its main mission of reporting news that actually happened in an accurate and objective way into covering stirring and controversial issues as news stories due to capitalistic motives. Moreover, today’s media took the motto “If it bleeds it leads” as a criteria to report any story. The aim of following this motto was to achieve high viewership rates and as a result gain more advertisers which will ultimately increase the profits. However, this motto changed the media from reporting facts into reporting sensational-fearful news. Thus, this paper will demonstrate the effects of sensational news, and how the media plays on the cultivation theory using sensationalism to increase viewers.

Sensational journalism and its effect
First of all, what is sensational journalism or media sensationalism and what are its potential effects?
According to Mehrotra (2011), media sensationalism is defined as “style of reporting news to public which involves use of fear, anger, excitement and crude thrill undertaken by the media to increase the viewership, ratings and lastly profits”. Moreover, this technique is used for two reasons: first to increase the rate of the viewers, and the second is to persuade the viewer that the solution for the suggested fear will be demonstrated in the news story. (Serani, 2011) .Additionally, the key to the success of sensational based news is in presenting the news in a sensational - fearful anecdote format instead of scientific facts. Thus, the media is promoting inaccurate news as the reports are aired without fact checking and based on sensationalism rather than on accurate facts. Hence, this style of reporting inaccurate news has hazardous effects on ...

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...ary 3, 2014, from http://voices.yahoo.com/cultivation-theory-fear-media-592957.html?cat=9
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Mehrotra, R. (2011, July 27). Effects of Media Sensationalism. Retrieved February 3, 2014, from http://www.buzzle.com/articles/effects-of-media-sensationalism.html
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Serani, D. (2011, June 7). If It Bleeds, It Leads: Understanding Fear-Based Media | Psychology Today [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/two-takes-depression/201106/if-it-bleeds-it-leads-understanding-fear-based-media

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