Wake of Echoes

Last week, I told you a little known fact about roadway deaths in America, which accumulated to more than 75,000 people in 2015 and 2016 combined. But the media has been mostly silent about those tragic deaths. Why is that? I shared my ideas (and my disgust) in part one of a series on the value of LIFE in the American Media. Today I continue that series with part two: Do All Lives Matter? War & Peace George Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze "My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war , banished from the earth." -- George Washington Just reading our first president's words brings tears to my eyes. First, because I've read extensively about Washington and what he went through to bring this great nation into being. The Revolutionary War was at the same time horrific and glorious, characterized by both needless deaths and deaths that bought liberty so precious, we who are Americans can barely comprehend life w...

News this weekend included floods in the gulf coast , a fire and knife attack on a Swiss train, an elderly woman who was accidentally shot by police in Florida, and a Washington woman who crashed her car upside down into a Starbucks drive-thru. So why were these stories in the news? And what stories might have been rejected so these stories could be featured? Newsworthiness is the term I learned back in J school that expresses all the possible components of an event that could qualify it for coverage by the media. Today I will define each term, give examples and then talk about how they might be manipulated to create bias. Newsworthiness isn’t an equation or a checklist. An event doesn’t have to meet three out of seven criteria to be considered newsworthy, for example. Neither does ONE element typically make something newsworthy. It’s usually a combination of these elements that has to be judged by editorial staff. On a slow news day, the top story might be a pol...