Fred and Marcy Sittin' In a Tree...

Just ignore the title. I didn't know what else to use but had decided this North Coast Journal article showed at least one point of agreement between Media Maven Marcy Burstiner and myself.

There's been discussion locally for some time regarding all the crime in Humboldt. The Tuluwat Examiner being one that likes to say crime is on the rise in the county, if not out of control. The Examiner manipulates the issue for partisan purposes, of course, but others might sincerely believe crime is escalating. 

I don't, and didn't think so. We just get that impression because that's pretty much all we read about in the news. Sensational stuff is what gets people to read news and that's why they report it. I don't blame the media for concentrating on things that will get people's attention. Burstiner made the same point:

The problem with the news industry is that it feels compelled to report what's new. But in rural areas that isn't much. So instead, news organizations report anomalies and after a while, we think the anomalies are the norm. When news sites can report EVERY child abduction in the country as individual news items, we think children are abducted everywhere, when that isn't the case. They don't report children who get home safe every day. When every homicide is reported and not much of anything else, we think homicides happen everywhere, all the time. Newspapers don't report non-crime.

Exactly. She then went on to write, "I'd like to wake up every morning and see a big five-column headline in my paper: "Nothing Bad Happened Today." That's a paper I'd read."

I don't think she would. Too boring. I wouldn't read a paper like that either.