Newsy 📺 🗞️
"Know your audience."
—Journalism maxim
> newsworthy | adjectives
Because of the nature of perception, it’s accurate to say that the entire news industry is built on air.
News organizations have a need for audiences to perceive them as trustworthy and credible.
These are two adjectives made of air that we perceive, not measure.
- Scholars and media corporations have studied audience trust and credibility perceptions for decades.
- When it comes to the media, there's far more going on in the human mind than we realize.
In undergraduate and graduate journalism courses, we read about how media effects prompted shifts in public opinion, persuaded consumers, and directed voters or parents to take desired actions.
We experience guilt over our media choices and love of true crime and reality shows. 🔪🩸
We worry that we're overindulging. Our favorite media thing makes us feel trashy.
We worry that the shows we love entertain more than they inform. We worry that gazing at commercials and "bad" or negative news makes us depraved.
True crime isn't evidence of moral decay. It's evidence that we're human.
On a Zoom meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous one night, a woman who lived alone said she kept true crime on her TV anytime she was at home. It made her feel safer.
I don’t know why, she said, as if she should be embarrassed.
There's nothing more human than wanting to feel safe.
My mom listens to the police scanners. My sister loves true crime.
These facts are not evidence of moral collapse.
They're evidence that my family is made of human beings.
True crime is neither good nor bad. It just is.
- next time "At the heart of their cases were questionable eyewitnesses."
- listening Brent Faiyaz "Make Luv"
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