When I got on the Internet around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, my homepage pulled up a story on a serial rapist near the University of Nevada at Reno. Considering the saftey issues U of I has had on its campus, the story caught my attention.
The story itself was good. It told all of the necessary information, including both breaking news and background details. But what caught my eye was the video. Throughout the entire video, CNN had music playing in the background. The music was the kind you would hear in the middle of an action scene during a movie or on the previews for court TV. Considering the anchor for the story, Nancy Grace, used to work on court TV, this didn't surprise me. However, the editors should have made the decision to either delete the music or play a more appropriate genre.
Linking the slaying of a student with a serial rapist is a serious topic, and it deserves a serious tone in the news coverage. Playing music in the background that you would hear in a movie diminishes the gravity of the story and makes the coverage appear like entertainment.
Media already has a problem drawing the line between news and entertainment. With shows such as "Inside Edition," "Rescue 911" and "Unsolved Mysteries," the industry struggles to define which genre certain shows belong to.
Nancy Grace has received criticism in the past when a guest on her show, Melinda Duckett, committed suicide after a confrontational interview in 2006. The story was covered by a number of big networks and papers including ABC, the Washington Post and Fox News. The Associated Press also wrote their own story about it.
If the news we're covering is going to be taken seriously, editors need to ensure that it is being covered in an appropriate manner, and that includes music.
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2 years ago
3 comments:
I completely agree with you. Covering the slaying of a student is a serious topic and every part of its reporting should be taken seriously, down to the music played in the background of a video. Playing a song that should be heard in movie in the background of a news story on someone that has died is unethical. Editors should check everything before it is posted on the internet.
I've found a lot of stories reported by Nancy Grace to be overblown, inflated and even bombastic. Her show often toes the line between news and entertainment, especially when it comes to stories regarding missing children, etc. While the stories are certainly dramatic, I feel she goes overboard both with how she covers these stories the amount of time she devotes to them.
On a tangent, I've never understood how one missing child story can receive hours upon hours of coverage from a news outlet when there are hundreds of missing children cases across the country that go unreported. I understand some stories have a more interesting, "CSI-esque" background, but the despairity of coverage from story to story isn't fair to the families whose stories aren't covered.
It really irks me when people compare shows like "Inside Edition" and magazines like "Us Weekly" to real journalism. If they don't strive to practice any aspect of traditional journalism (and I'm talking the bare bones of journalism, such as accuracy ), then they cannot be considered journalists. It is disturbing that Nancy Grace and the people who put together this video wanted to jazz it up by putting in music. They obviously didn't think how the family might feel if they saw this. Clearly the producers of the video couldn't get a job as E! True Hollywood Story producers and therefore feel the need to dramatize actual news.
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