A Glimpse at the American Media and Public

Yesterday while I was working, Nadia, a women I work with, got a call from home (Malaysia) saying that there had been an earthquake. Nadia told me that she was concerned because the only time there had ever been an earthquake felt in Malaysia (during her life) was the earthquake that sparked the Tsunami in Dec 2004. This concerned us not for the Malaysia, as the damage there was minimal, but for the Indonesians who were trying to rebuild from the first Tsunami. We went to cnn.com and found the earthquake under the ‘breaking news’ headline. The article said that the earthquake had been an 8.3 (later updated to an 8.7) and would probably spark another Tsunami. It said that they would know whether a Tsunami was created within a half an hour.

Nadia and I decided that we would come back and check the status in a half hour and at 11:00 we did just that. Again cnn.com had its familiar red ‘Breaking News’ bar up. I figured that it would be about the earthquake which would likely kill thousands of people, Tsunami or not. To my surprise the bar was about the Michael Jackson trial!!!! What the hell??? I was not on the Entertainment Tonight web sight, I was on CNN, Americas number one source for realtime news. Somewhere some news editor decided that it was more important to inform the public about the Michael Jackson trial than to inform them about the earthquake that would eventually claim nearly a thousand lives! Because the media is a reflection of the people it attempts it to appeal to, this is not only a sad picture of the American media but also a sad portrait of the American public.