Hot news, cold newsSo, can you guess what the HOT NEWS stories are about? I'm sure you can. Here are a few hints: almost all involve white females, although one of them involves a fictional adolescent boy. The few males represented are accused or suspected of committing crimes. And of those crimes, only one has any potential national or international significance.
Do you ever wonder how some stories in the news get covered extensively; others, seemingly more important, get little coverage, and still others get no coverage at all?
Here are a few examples of what I mean by COLD NEWS. These are stories that are "out there" but there is little or no follow-up.
• In Iraq, it has been reported that $8.8 billion allocated to the Coalition Provisional Authority has been "lost." This astounding sum of money was stolen, misallocated, or otherwise frittered away while Paul Bremer was in charge of the CPA. There has been no public explanation of what happened to the money or how the loss is being investigated. And no one in the mainstream media seems to be pursuing the issue. Why not? As you will recall, Bill and Hillary Clinton's $68,000 lost investment in Whitewater generated a five-year investigation.
• Before the war, there was much discussion about Iraq having the second largest oil reserves in the world (behind only Saudi Arabia), and cynics maintained that this was the real reason for the war. Since then, there have been a few stories about sporadic attacks on the pipelines but little other hard news about what is happening with Iraqi oil. Who is now in control of this oil, where is it going, at what price, and who is profiting from it? What role are American oil companies playing? Other international oil companies? Iraqis?
As for entries in the NO NEWS category…where to begin? Britt offers three suggestions:
• The abysmal state of the election process in the world's greatest democracy;***
• Why 40 percent of Gulf War I veterans are too sick to work;
• Why the US health-care system, costing 78 percent more than the average in the other major industrialized nations, gets worse public-health results.
And now for some statistical insights into everybody's favorite fake news show…
Public Brewery publishes a content analysis of The Daily Show. The analysis was conducted as part of a course on "Mock News and Democracy." Go check out it out.
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