With the snowballing increase in technology and news availability few things go unnoticed these days, this can be not only viewed as a blessing but also a curse. There was once a time where people had to wait until the morning newspaper to find out what happened the previous day and that was considered groundbreaking. Now everything from NFL football injuries to congress passing a bill to some routine traffic stop gone bad can be found out almost instantaneously in todays society.
I remember not too long ago when there was an asteroid heading towards earth and they discovered that it would breach the atmosphere somewhere above Russia that it would be really neat to see the footage of the event but it was almost 13,000 miles away and we would have to wait a while for the news to filter what we should and should not see. Amazingly, almost as soon as I found out the destination of where it was going to land videos began popping up all over the internet! It was a great way to globally dominate everyone's attention to one incredible event.
But with the good always comes someone that can capitalize people's attention and drive to flock towards certain media, and interestingly enough it seems that most people are more attracted to scandalous activity than disaster lately. Last year at the always classy Music Television Video Awards an extremely low-brow performer decided to engage in an age-old stripper technique recently coined as "twerking". This was a cheap and typical way of the new generation bringing back an old public relations technique called "Hucksterism" in which the policy is "any publicity is good publicity".
As obnoxious and beaten to death this topic is it was actually effective and proves that we seemingly are going to be amused the same way people used to with this technique (fake taxidermy mermaids and 3 headed dogs). But the part that interests me is what was actually happening at the same time that this blanket story was thrown over the media. Behind the scenes of all of this adolescent cry for help lies a whisper of the executive order that has been brewing for months prior, an executive order about drones and whether or not they should or should not be imposing on our civil liberties. Nearly every class that I was taking that semester would ask how we felt about the VMA's and nothing to do with the huge imposition on civil liberties that was being under-reported right under our noses (which when I mentioned it none of the students had any idea what I was talking about).
Where this all comes together is just a symphony of the agenda setting theory. The media deliberately seems to lean more towards the easy news rather than the complex news because either no-one wants to spend the time to know why things are going on with politics or they're too occupied trying to guess what the Kardashian's favorite flavor of flan is. This can be seen almost everywhere, you check out at a supermarket for instance and look at the magazines, almost all of it is gossip about people who 99% of us will never meet, and the closest thing that informs you about foreign policy is maybe Time magazine at best. I'm not going down the avenue of saying that all of this is just more than convenient timing between the two events, however, when it comes to the metaphorical cannon of news, they're aiming it.
