Income Inequality and Discrimination in US News Media Graded Discussion

News media graded discussion

Much of the content in this module details what makes the news. For this discussion, I want you to think about what does NOT make the news. I noted elsewhere in this module that the news values dictate content, and considerations like importance to society (things the audience really should know) are not among those values; issue “importance” is at best a minor consideration. So scan the news and think about an important issue that is NOT being reported. THIS IS DIFFICULT TO DO. What is “newsworthy” is so ingrained in us as news consumers that it’s often difficult to think beyond what is being reported. When I’ve asked students to do something like this in the past, I’ve often gotten other events (“this event/this crime/this happening didn’t get much coverage and it should’ve gotten more”). That’s missing the point. Try to get outside of this event focus. Pretend like those news values don’t exist. You don’t have to worry about objectivity or informativeness or simplicity or any of that. If your ONLY news value was importance, what’s a story that your news outlet would run?

For this discussion, YOUR STORY IDEA NEEDS TO BE UNIQUE! Unlike some of the other graded discussions, you should not build off of others ideas here. As I also mentioned elsewhere in this module, there are literally billions of possible stories that could be covered. So once someone has posted an idea, that’s off the table for everyone else. Be sure to read through the other responses then. It’s as if we were putting together an experimental news Web site. At the end, once everyone has posted, we should have a nice, wide variety of important, otherwise uncovered stories that this Web site would contain.

In your post, tell us these three things:

1. What your story topic would be

2. Why this topic is important for the audience to hear/read about (what are the societal implications)

3. Why this topic isn’t being covered by mainstream news outlets (hint: it’s probably because it doesn’t fit the news values very well, so you could explain which values it fails and why)