News, it's what we all watch on a daily basis. It's the trusted source of information no matter what station we"re watching. It's the power plant of knowledge that is supposed to be correct all the time. However, the question that starts to arise, is the news really telling you the entire story? Is the news giving every detail they should to make the truth really what it should be? Is the news giving all the background information behind the story? The news leaves many of these details out for one purpose, to entertain viewers in an attempt to keep their ratings up. Higher ratings mean more viewers which means more advertisers want to come to their station and pay large sums of money to use just a fraction of the air time allotted to show off the product they try to sell. The following paragraphs will show how the news leaves out what seem like minor details, but could in fact change the way stories are looked at by viewers.
While watching the evening news last Saturday night, the broadcast started out talking about garage break-ins. This is not a problem that affects the majority of the population, but it's interesting to see what is happening to the minority, the small fraction of people to which this happens, across the region. You never think about the "what if this happened to me" side of it, and the news stations use that. What I found rather strange is that when the title of the story, the garage break-ins, is used in a plural, so according to that it has happened to more than one person, but when they go into detail about the story, they only interview one woman, what happened to the other ten reports they supposedly had in the last week? The news doesn't clearly point out where the break-ins happen, they only give a large general area of the city that is heavily populated, and they don't offer any idea as to what the criminals may be after. The news doesn't describe the objects taken at all the break-in sites, just the one woman's personal belongings like glasses, pictures of her kids, and cell phone.