Media Hype

1) I do not think it is ever ethical to alter a photograph or video that accompanies your news reporting. The story about the student being placed in the photograph to make it look more ethnic was ridiculous. It is almost like well duh do they not think that they will not be caught and someone will say hey I was never there. There is a dove commercial that I think about with this and how they distorted the model so much that it didn’t even look like her when it came time for the billboard. The fact that things go on like this is appalling.

2) The news media should not adjust their news reporting for a hype story. The shark attack story, “summer of the sharks” was insane for how much coverage that got. The fact that 20/20 said that summer wasn’t even the worse they have seen was crazy. I was scared that year to go swimming in the ocean and I was not even in the same ocean that the shark attacks where at. I was in Mexico and I was scared, it is sad now that the media hype of that story affected me so much and I was not even near the attacks. They then continued to say that previous years have been much worse but bigger news issues beat of them for coverage.
3) I am not a hundred percent sure what exactly this is saying about journalist excepting junkets from PR firms but it does not sound like something that Edward Murrow would approve of in his journalist standards. I have heard of the word junkets and I thought that was what they do when a big movie is coming out and they have a junket for it promoting it. I think that accepting anything like the name freebies is never a good thing. Nothing is ever free; something always comes with a price.

4) I think that the Fat Squad fooled everyone because we are so gullible to what we hear or read. We will believe anything that we hear without asking ourselves first if it is even remotely true. I think that the media wanted to believe stories like this ridiculous because they had something to occupy their time that week. The media was slow with stories and this seemed like some miracle thing going on. These weird people going around stalking people and telling them not to eat. It is almost laughable that they did believe any of the nonsense that this group did. I think that the internet news media is more likely to fall for pranks because the internet can be updated within seconds, while television can only have so many breaking news stories before people start to change the channel. With the internet people are logging on constantly to check facebook, twitter or email and any of those ways news can reach millions of people faster than television sometimes.