bias and sensationalism: why 24-hour news is no longer news

8/13/2019 Bias and Sensationalism: Why 24-Hour News Is No Longer News

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Jeffrey Wang Wang 1

06 December 2013A5

Bias and Sensationalism: Why 24-Hour News Is No Longer News

“ It is time the American people, of any race, let neighborhoods and workplaces, rather than the press or net or media, determine racial attitude.” — Clark McDuffie, Yahoo! Voices contributor

At 7:16 p.m. on February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

Martin, an African American teenager, was visiting his father’s fiancée in Sanford,

Florida. At that particular time of the day, he was returning home from a nearby Seven-Eleven,

having just purchased a can of iced tea and a packet of Skittles.

Zimmerman, a white neighborhood watch volunteer, was driving by on a personal errand

when he saw Martin. He then proceeded to call the Sanford non-emergency number to report

what he considered “a real suspicious guy”. Of his own volition, Zimmerman stated that the

“guy” “look[ed] black”, coloring his description with the racial slur “fucking coon”.

One minute after Zimmerman terminated his call with the Sanford police department, a

gunshot was heard in the background of a witness’s 911 call. To those following the tragedy on

the news, it was a cut-and-dried case of racially-motivated murder. A hate crime.

Everyone knows this story. But to those who researched past it, there was one problem.

Zimmerman wasn’t white. He was Hispanic.

Due to a need to preserve ratings and maintain a viewer base, the 24-hour news cycle

must market to watchers’ biases, and one of the major social issues along which our society is

split — ripe for media exploitation — is that of race. As a result, news sources have become more

sensationalistic, often bending or falsifying facts. Critical reasoning is becoming increasingly

valuable and necessary in ascertaining the validity of news reports and the conclusions they

imply. To pierce media sensationalism around racism, viewers must accept the responsibility of

informing themselves, whether by doing their own research or by using multiple news sources.



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The phrase “24-hour news cycle” denotes the investigation and reporting of news during

all 24 hours of the day, with a single “news cycle” referring to the process of providing news

coverage of an event and subsequently reporting on public reactions to this earlier coverage. The

arrival of CNN — the Cable News Network — in 1980 heralded the beginning of this style of

news. No longer limited to only the most important stories, CNN soon covered markedly

different events from more attention-seeking angles in order to present 48 times as much news as

half-hour shows such as the CBS Evening News; for example, viewers could “tune in live to see

if a schnauzer could be pulled from a truck stuck in floodwaters” (Sundem). This new mode of

journalism reached a peak during the Gulf War, as the physical presence of CNN reporters such

as Peter Arnett and Bernard Shaw in Baghdad “while the [a]nti-air weapons fired outside the

window of their hotel room” gave CNN’s reporting an immediacy and freshness that established

it as the standard for what the public wanted from its news (Hansen and Folkenflik, Sorensen).

Recognizing its potential, two more cable news stations emerged to jump on the 24-hour

news bandwagon in 1996 — Fox News and MSNBC, forming the trifecta of networks that would

eventually dominate the news scene. In the early 2000s, the attacks on September 11 and the

subsequent War on Terror provided the fuel necessary for these two fledgling channels to firmly

establish themselves as CNN’s competitors; competition for ratings soon joined the existing need

for more news, viewers, and schnauzer rescues as a factor behind a growing need to attract

attention. This desire for attention quickly manifested itself as what has been termed “journalism

of assertion”; the networks realized that the easiest way to get ahead was to be the first to deliver

news to the public, and began to shift their focus from fully researching a story to “getting it into

the public discussion” (Kovach and Rosenstiel). As the quality of reporting dropped — first from

an influx of less important news, and then from decreased attention to verification of facts — a



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third development rounded out the transition from research journalism to fast-paced headline

reporting: opinion commentary. Like candidates in a political race, the networks realized that —

despite their journalistic duties — they could not succeed purely through reliance on impartiality.

Politically speaking, for example, Fox News and MSNBC tend to lean conservative and liberal,

respectively, and while CNN is generally intermediate even it is slightly liberal in its opinions

(Cable). Having noticed the polarizing effect that news could have, 24-hour news channels

began adding commentary, interviews, and talk shows in order to market themselves to more

specific groups. Ultimately, greater news volume, journalism of assertion, and reporting bias

converged into a need for sensationalistic news — news that could be run for hours on end,

created schisms in public opinion, and could be tweaked to further inflame tensions.

The issue of racism fits the bill perfectly. Race is a highly polarizing topic, due in no

small part to its historical freshness. Slavery, for example, was outlawed in the United States in

1865, over thirty years after the British Empire had already abolished it. Additionally, the

United States legally allowed racial segregation until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in

1964 — a stark contrast to the UK, which never had any such practice to begin with; in fact,

further highlighting the recentness of the issue, the last Civil Rights Act was passed in 1991

(Civil Rights Timeline). The American struggle with racism is also distinguished from those of

other countries by the sheer magnitude of the race movement it experienced. Called the “largest

mass movement for racial reform and civil rights in the 20th century”, it spanned a decade and a

half and included now-famous stories such as those of Rosa Parks, the desegregation of Little

Rock Central High School, and the legendary speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. (Marable). This

chronological proximity combined with the cultural and educational emphasis placed on the civil



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rights movement have resulted in a society that — whether consciously or not — places great

significance on issues of racial division.

Such a society is in a perfect position for the news media to manipulate — and manipulate

it has. In fact, news sources did this as early as 1991, when CNN was still the only 24-hour news

network on TV; the other channels, ABC News and NBC News, had begun sensationalizing their

reports in order to better compete with CNN’s success (ABC News would make the conversion

to 24-hour news in 1995, and NBC would follow in 1996 with the creation of MSNBC). In

March of that year, African American construction worker Rodney King was heavily beaten by

four police officers after a high-speed chase on both the freeway and surface streets. Fully aware

of the frustrations of the Los Angeles African American community, TV networks capitalized on

a video of the beating shot by a man named George Holliday (Gray). The excerpts of the

Holliday video that were shown, described as a “frightening videotape of white police officers

beating a black man”, were broadcast repeatedly, drumming into viewers the notion that the

incident was a clear case of white violence against a defenseless African American (Prager).

What the networks did not report, however, was that from the perspective of the four

LAPD officers involved in the incident, King was anything but defenseless. His arrest report

listed him as an imposing 6’3” tall, weighing 225 pounds; his blood alcohol concentration was

0.19, more than twice the legal limit. He refused to comply with orders to lie prone on the

ground, and when an officer tried to subdue him King “almost knocked him off his feet”

(Report). He was hit with a Taser twice but somehow ignored the effects — leading the sergeant

present to believe that King was under the influence of the hallucinogen PCP, which had been

found to impart some degree of resistance to the weapon — and moved toward the officers. Only

then — with a large, drunk, noncompliant, and possibly hallucinating suspect heading their way —



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did the officers begin to use their batons, and the beating only continued in response to King’s

continued attempts to rise in direct defiance of orders. None of this was ever evident to viewers;

for months, news programs “deliberately and repeatedly showed only the most brutal seconds of

the tape”, thus removing all context from the video in order to make it as sensational as possible

(Prager). Just how sensational it was — especially in the highly race-sensitive society of Los

Angeles — became evident a year later, when the acquittal of the four officers pushed the pent-up

resentment past the breaking point and ignited the LA riots, which killed 53 and caused over 1

billion dollars in damages (Gray). There is little doubt that had the public been fully informed

about the events and circumstances of the incident, tensions — and the accompanying risk of

violence — would have been lowered.

More recent, of course, is the now-infamous case of George Zimmerman — a case that by

rights should not have become infamous, but was made so thanks to a collective effort by 24-

hour news networks that made the edited Holliday video seem like child’s play. A mere two

weeks after the incident, the Martins’ family attorney Benjamin Crump stated on MSNBC that

Zimmerman was white. That same day, an ABC News reporter stated that Martin was shot

“[because] he was black ” (Nolte). As the story began to heat up, claims became increasingly

ridiculous. CNN “reported” that Zimmerman had used the racial slur “fucking coon” to describe

Martin during the 911 call. NBC News cut and pasted bits of the call transcript in order to show

its viewers that Zimmerman had said “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black ”.

And both ABC and NBC News claimed that Zimmerman was not injured when taken into

custody after the shooting (Nolte).

All of these were, at best, blatant defamation and fabrication of information. Zimmerman

was Hispanic, not white, although the New York Times deserves some credit for attempting to



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strike a compromise between truth and sensationalism by describing the man as a “white

Hispanic” (a feat for which, Joe Concha sardonically writes, it should be granted a patent)

(Alvarez). Nor did he utter “coon”, and although CNN retracted the falsehood a month later, the

damage had already been done; additionally, NBC News is currently facing a lawsuit regarding

the defamation inherent in its edited call transcript (Graham, Concha). And despite the claims

made by ABC and NBC, Zimmerman suffered two black eyes, a fractured nose, and cuts to the

back of his head, according to medical records used in the court case (Court records). Viewers

could have easily discovered the falseness of this reported “information” had they bothered to

look past what the news networks were feeding them; a number of articles, such as those by

Graham and Concha, were written with intent to expose false and fabricated material. Instead,

blinded by both their trust in the news and their subconscious sensitivity to race issues, they

allowed the media to “gin up racial tensions where none needed to exist” (Nolte). Had they been

fully aware of what had transpired —that Zimmerman had suffered injuries at Martin’s hands,

that he did not bring up race until prompted, that he was not even white to begin with — there is

no doubt that public reception of the case and verdict would have been drastically different.

In both the Rodney King and Zimmerman-Martin incidents, better critical reasoning

would help facilitate more productive perspectives of the cases by rectifying the defining

features of the public’s susceptibility to news manipulation: lack of information and lack of

opposing opinions. Being informed is paramount to forming a viewpoint; while it is certainly

true that all individuals are entitled to their own opinions, perspectives predicated upon

inaccurate information are inherently flawed because their unreliability decreases their

usefulness and productivity in deciding on a course of action. In the case of the Rodney King

beating, for example, a perspective formulated after consideration of all the facts is clearly



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superior to a perspective created based only on the news edit of the Holliday video because —

regardless of what either viewpoint is — the former is a choice that takes into account the full

breadth of data, while the latter is led to a conclusion by incomplete information. In order to

allow for more constructive action, it is necessary to break free of blind trust in the information

given by news media and to realize that the best opinion is an informed one; critical thinking is

thus required to effectively and thoroughly gather and evaluate research.

Just as important as exposure to balanced information is exposure to a balanced mix of

opinions. Should an individual listen only to those who share his perspective, he will have no

reason to consider anything else. This is especially evident in the Zimmerman-Martin case; as

expected, the majority of those who believed that Zimmerman committed a hate crime were

liberals and Democrats, and indeed most of the false information originated from NBC and

CNN, the two left-leaning networks. Because what they saw on the news so closely matched

their beliefs, liberal viewers had no reason to doubt the truth of what they were told — even if it

was blatantly falsified. The key point here is that to facilitate more beneficial discussion of the

issue at hand, it is crucial to consider alternative perspectives; here, too, critical reasoning is

necessary to properly evaluate opposing viewpoints as well as to compare them to one’s own

opinion and ultimately decide which is the most suitable.

As journalism becomes increasingly sensationalistic and manipulative, blind trust in news

media often leads to unnecessary tension and hysteria, as evidenced by the uproars created by

24-hour reporting over the Rodney King and Trayvon Martin incidents. A productive

atmosphere can be restored simply through the application of critical reasoning to carefully

evaluate all available information and possible perspectives before formulating an opinion or

deciding on a course of action. The optimal choice is always the most informed and objective.



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At 7:16 p.m. on February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

Martin, an African American teenager, was visiting his father’s fiancée in Sanford,

Florida. At that particular time of the day, he was returning home from a nearby Seven-Eleven,

having just purchased a can of iced tea and a packet of Skittles.

Zimmerman, a Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer, was driving by on a personal

errand when he saw Martin. He then proceeded to call the Sanford non-emergency number to

report what he considered “a real suspicious guy”, clarifying that although it was raining, Martin

was just “walking around, looking about”. When the dispatcher asked about Martin’s race,

Zimmerman replied, “He looks black.”

One minute after Zimmerman terminated his call with the Sanford police department, a

gunshot was heard in the background of a witness’s 911 call. When police arrived on the scene

Zimmerman had a bloody, swollen nose and a gash on the back of his head. Martin had engaged

him in a violent confrontation, and Zimmerman had been obliged to draw his gun. Self defense.



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Works Cited

Alvarez, Lizette. "City Criticizes Police Chief After Shooting." The New York Times. 22 Mar.

2012. Web. 01 Dec. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/us/police-chief-draws-

fire-in-trayvon-martin-shooting.html?_r=0>.

"Cable — Three Different Networks, Three Different Perspectives." Pew Research Centers

Journalism Project RSS . Web. 01 Dec. 2013.

<http://www.journalism.org/2008/10/29/cable-three-different-networks-three-different-

perspectives/>.

"Civil Rights Movement Timeline." Infoplease. Web. 01 Dec. 2013.

<http://www.infoplease.com/spot/civilrightstimeline1.html>.

Concha, Joe. "From Serious to Sensationalism: Zimmerman Trial Shows Where Journalism Has

Gone Since O.J." Mediaite. 14 July 2013. Web. 01 Dec. 2013.

<http://www.mediaite.com/online/from-serious-to-sensationalism-zimmerman-trial-

shows-where-journalism-has-gone-since-o-j/>.

"Court Records Show George Zimmerman Had Two Black Eyes, Broken Nose." CBSNews. 16

May 2012. Web. 01 Dec. 2013. <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/court-records-show-

george-zimmerman-had-two-black-eyes-broken-nose/>.

Graham, Tim. "CNN Walks It Back: Oops, Zimmerman Didn't Say 'Coon,' He Said It Was

'Cold'!" NewsBusters. 06 Apr. 2012. Web. 01 Dec. 2013.

<http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2012/04/06/cnn-walks-it-back-oops-

zimmerman-didnt-say-coon-he-said-it-was-cold>.

Gray, Madison. "The L.A. Riots: 15 Years After Rodney King." TIME . Web. 01 Dec. 2013.

<http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1614117_1614084,00.html>.



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Hansen, Liane, and David Folkenflik. "The Power of the 24-Hour News Cycle." NPR. Web. 01

Dec. 2013. <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4671485>.

Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstiel. Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media. New York:

Century Foundation, 1999. Print.

Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. New York: Viking, 2011. Print.

Nolte, John. "Timeline: How the Press Prosecuted Zimmerman While Stoking Racial

Tensions." Breitbart News Network . 13 July 2013. Web. 01 Dec. 2013.

<http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/07/13/Media-Zimmerman-Coverage-

Rap-Sheet>.

Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department . 1991. Police

Assessment Resource Center . Web. 01 Dec. 2013.

<http://www.parc.info/client_files/Special%20Reports/1%20-

%20Chistopher%20Commision.pdf>.

Sorensen, Jeff. "24 Hour News Killed Journalism." The Huffington Post . 20 Aug. 2012. Web. 01

Dec. 2013. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-sorensen/24-hour-

news_b_1813081.html>.

Sundem, Garth. "How Have 24-hour News Stations Affected Society?" HowStuffWorks. Web. 01

Dec. 2013. <http://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/tv-and-culture/24-hour-

news-stations-affected-society1.htm>.

"Transcript of George Zimmerman's Call to the Police." Mother Jones. Web. 01 Dec. 2013.

<http://www.motherjones.com/documents/326700-full-transcript-zimmerman>.

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