An Improved Relationship — How “Inside the News Media“ Aroused my Interest for News
Every day, all of us are surrounded by (news) media, which seem to be impossible to ignore. Our daily life is filled with the latest news about politics, economy, crime, local and international events, gossip and tittle-tattle and finally the weather. I for one have to admit that I never was a news expert or used to watch, read or listen to the news regularly. I was fine with reading some headlines on Facebook or to incidentally overhear the most important developments — as I said, media is everywhere. In this context you can imagine how reduced my enthusiasm was when our teacher at varsity, Geoffrey, introduced us to our task for this semester: to publish our own blog entry about news media every other week. Aside from the fact that, up to that point, I had no experience in blogging, I could not imagine that I was going to find so many topics interesting enough to analyse critically and to write about.
Yet, I quickly changed my mind. The feeling of being forced to focus on the news media soon changed into motivation to find an attractive news issue to discuss. In class, Geoffrey encouraged us to critical reflect the news media. In this context we talked about media theories, Facebook and fake news, the reliability of news reports, news value and breaking news for example. Soon, these discussions made me look at news in a different, a more critical and observing, way. When I tried to find an appropriate topic to write my blog entry about, I was skipping through news reports and articles asking myself questions like “How does the media present this topic?“, “Why is this topic chosen?”, or “Why did a news programme decide not to cover a particular event?”, ” By whom might the media be (unofficially) influenced?”. Suddenly, finding a topic to write about was much easier as first expected! And, Geoffrey might be glad to hear that, it was surprisingly fun. These questions and discussions made me become much more interested in news and the way they are presented. However, to be honest, I am sure I will not continue blogging after the end of this semester, since I am simply not one for writing blogs, but I will definitely keep my grown interest for news and for reflecting the news media’s coverage.
