At my block party last night, I was talking to my 40-some year old neighbor and she brought up the topic of Miley Cyrus' VMA performance. I was pretty surprised because I had no idea the older community was at all interested in Miley Cyrus' twerking ability. I had the impression that only Miley-obsessed-teens still talked about her. This prompted me to go look at just how interested people actually were in Miley Cyrus. After reading an article in the Huffington post about the interest in Miley Cyrus at the VMA's and Syria, I was blown away. The Google searches (by Americans) for Miley Cyrus' performance outnumbers searches for Syria a whopping 6:1. After reading further, I calmed down a bit when I found out there were 3X more Syria news stories than Miley news stories. Further, the articles in major newspapers about Syria outnumber Miley articles 11:1.
It is not surprising to me that writers for the New York Times and other newspapers choose to write about Syria rather than Miley because they are professional journalists and the average newspaper reader is probably going to be more interested in that than Miley. The average age of someone who watches TV news reports is probably less than that of a newspaper reader. The average computer user is probably even younger than both groups. It seems to me that the younger Americans are focusing their attention on the wrong things. Even though I am glad newspapers chose not to write tons of articles about Miley's twerking, it still bothers me that the average American is 6X more likely to Google Miley Cyrus than Syria. Is a VMA performance really more important than genocides in Syria?
Hi Jacqui,
ReplyDeleteI like how you started this post with an everyday conversation and then linked it to an actual text. Try using a short quote from HuffPo. And quickly noting its bias.
I would be careful to refer to the "40-some" crowd as "the older community"! :)
And though the length of this post is appropriate, it feels like Syria is getting the short-shrift. Are there really, as you say, "genocides" occurring? You might research how the USA defines that particular term.