Why is Puerto Rico still without power? Why does Flint still not have clean water? Why is climate change still seen as a hoax? A better question would be as to why I know more about a grade-B Hollywood star’s life more than I know about what is happening in my own country. What – or who – is to blame for my lack of knowledge and resources? Surely it can’t be myself when I have infinite ways to type into a search engine and find current events. What’s lacking in these global, sensational news sites that offer me summaries loaded with exaggerations and comedic opinions that don’t really reflect the current standpoint and truth of my country? A glance at any ‘news’ site or a flip through any magazine will give you front to back coverage of who wore that outfit and why. But where is the ten-page report on the damage Hurricane Irma caused and how it’s still affecting our people? Why did we all stop looking for updates? 

As the internet has grown in size the requests for celebrity news has increased exponentially while the real world topics are thrown into the background. It has become a huge problem in the journalism community that sensationalized news has become the easiest way to get “clicks” and gather ad revenue. Pop culture dominants our opinions and adjusts our way of believing how the world operates. Our global attitudes represent how we perceive news outlets. We give those who write about Hollywood engagements more attention than the nationally acclaimed journalists who are passionate about covering significant, real-world news. These journalists should be holding more power, earning more recognition and receiving more revenue and opportunities. From a general standpoint, America truly didn’t listen to the potential risks of us all being bombed by North Korea’s nuclear threats. We were more interested in the Royal Wedding and their newborn baby; a couple that isn’t even living in (or relevant to) our country. According to Google Scholar, there are over 6.4 million released articles about the Royal Wedding, compared to a small 915,000 released articles about the North Korea bombing threats.

Image via Gallup

America’s trust in mass media is at all time low, but yet we still tune-in to every pop culture event on TV. The demand for real news isn’t out there because celebrities overpower journalism. Journalists make money from ad revenue (how many of us use ad-blockers?). While journalists still write for newspapers, the amount of money they make from those who buy and read newspapers is low. It ranges around the median amount for all journalists in all aspects of writing (broadcast news reporting, online article assessments, etc.) The views for television news has remained steady for the past six years, although from a larger, longer view, TV-viewing has declined drastically. Television’s biggest competitor? The internet.

Images via Gallup

It is never easy to name any single event in a particular year as the year’s preeminent pop culture moment. “Television has made celebrities both prevalent and ubiquitous, and with the rise of television came a whole new branch of the public relations industry. Public relations once focused on preparing accomplished individuals for the interest and scrutiny that had come to them. Now it involves manufacturing celebrities to meet the culture’s seemingly insatiable desire for them” (CQ Press).

With focus on one of the biggest events in our recent history, the Flint water crisis, it’s known that hundreds of journalists were laid off and fired during the storm of protests happening surrounding Flint’s status. Those who were covering the mayhem were not being paid to do their job. “Residents of Flint were searching for information about their water before the government recognized the contamination and before local and regional news media coverage intensified” (Pew Research). As the crisis developed – for better or for worse – over the first two years, it became a nationally recognized event and for the first two years the globe was listening. Now, almost four years later, you’re lucky if you can find someone to recognize the world ‘Flint’. Perhaps that’s a little exuberant, but the point being is that Flint, Michigan still does have clean drinking water, and there aren’t any media outlets that surveillance this anymore.

All search categories from 2014 – 2015 saw tremendous out-pours of searches through all social media platforms except one: our government. Most of this attention came from Michigan and inside Flint itself. In the later half of 2015, search criteria from the entire country aspect were completely gone. Politicians in Flint and our government hadn’t even mentioned Michigan until it became an online phenomena. Any actual help wasn’t given to Flint until the beginning of the following year, when in January 2016 former President Obama declared Flint, Michigan a state of emergency, thus lending a hand and giving aid to the people who had been affected.

The elimination of jobs to cover the ‘behind-the-scenes’ coverage of Flint, as well as the people who have to survive without clean water devastated our outlook on the condition they were facing.

The performance of American media in covering the run-ups to Flint, and now the casualties that have happened after in terms of water quality, amount of deaths, and how little these people truly have to drink has the journalistic public full of scathing criticism. From the study conducted from Pew Research Center of Study, proxy search engines revealed that the general public tend to go for uncorroborated news sources such as Fox and CNN for the ‘latest’ and ‘breaking news’ stories.

“Many scholars find it useful to distinguish between fame and celebrity, connecting fame to the kind of renown people achieve for extraordinary talents or achievements, and celebrity for the kind of meretricious notoriety that is so prevalent today and so frequently criticized — the state of being known for being known” (CQ Researcher). CQ goes on to say that the smaller room for important news, the less likely for us to sit down and find out about it. The biggest challenge journalists have is combating celebrity news in a way to make their news mesmerizing and the important stories more important. There are hundreds of theories and researches conducted that conclude that us humans are compelled to the lives of those who are placed on a pedestal, and that the only reason these celebrities have our attention is because each story creates a widespread ripple affect.

So, why not a story about our futures gaining the ripple affect? Why do these not matter as much as a diamond-encrusted gown worn for a publicity event that has nothing to do with our communities? Democracy doesn’t work perfectly. But without informed citizens, it can’t possibly work at all.

Footnotes:

• Pew Research Center: Searching For News: The Flint water crisis
• Gallup: Americans See More News Bias
• CQR: Celebrity Culture