24 hour news -

Nobody would deny that having access to a variety of news sources is a good thing. We get a wide range of perspectives, from far-left to far-right, with everything in between, allowing us to draw our own conclusions. This has made us the most informed generation in history.

That said, our endless hunger for news might actually be the worst thing to happen to journalism.

North America alone has a nearly unlimited number of 24-hour news sources. There are the nonstop national news TV stations and their websites, of course, but just about every town has at least one television station and at least one newspaper that updates their website all day every day, too. That means that there is a phenomenal amount of “airtime” that needs to be filled.

Unfortunately, the demand for updates “rightthisverysecond” means that the facts inevitably suffer. Hearsay gets reported as probability, and speculation as fact. By the time the ACTUAL facts have fallen into place, most of the population has processed days or weeks of the distorted or totally wrong information, and is no longer even particularly INTERESTED in the final outcome.

We saw this most recently with the death of Michael Jackson. Within minutes, the news stations were falling all over themselves it was a heart attack, it was an overdose, it was suicide… It seemed like anyone who’d ever met him was dragged on camera to discuss what MIGHT have happened. With hours upon hours of airtime to fill, pretty much anything even remotely Jackson-related was broadcast with breathless excitement. The pinnacle of absurdity was probably when CNN’s Anderson Cooper did a report on… where Bubbles the Chimp was currently living. This is news?

And in another six weeks or so, when an actual explanation on Jackson’s cause of death is finally released, everyone will have moved on. In another six MONTHS, if you ask someone what killed Michael Jackson, chances are, they’ll reply with one of the speculative answers.

Sadly, it seems like people are being fed their news at such a frantic pace, that facts and truth are trampled en route to the big scoop. Maybe, if more media organizations waited for facts before presenting speculation AS facts, we wouldn’t just be informed… we’d be enlightened.