Jeremiads in the Media

You may not be consciously aware of it, but if you open any newspaper in the country, the diction is filled with doom and foreboding. Every headline contains strong, fearful action words, even if the message is far from disastrous. As we saw in Media Studies last term, one headline read "Boston Escapes 2009 with No Fire Deaths". The actual story is positive, but the words in the sentence paint a picture of fate trying to get us, and we're lucky to be alive. But such dramatic headlines can be found all the time, for example by simply scrolling the New York Times webpage.

"A Volatile Day on Wall St. as Officials Seek to Calm Fears". This headline lures one into the story of the stock market's ups and downs over the past couple days. The stock market always goes up and down. That's how it works. But the headline makes the scene more disastrous than it actually is and that people fear another potential drop. The article itself goes even further than the headlines, and suggests that the stock market could face a similar disaster to the 2008 financial crash.

Other headlines trace the sequence of events leading up to the failed Times Square Bombing attempt, and the sebsequent speculations afterwards. While an attempted bombing is serious enough, nobody actually died. Bomb scares happen all the time, especially in major metropolitan areas like New York City. But if you look at the headlines, they try to bring up the same intense, fearful emotions felt by Americans during 9/11.

Every night on local news channels and in newspapers, similar stories and headlines like these cram the pages. But does this foreboding language actually create any fear? Or does it actually serve to numb us to these events? I know for one that almost nothing on the news shocks me anymore. Tragedy after tragedy occurs everyday, and many news outlites report them. But after awhile I feel like these events occur so commonly that it would be difficult on a person to let themselves be emotionally affected by them. And maybe that's the real tragedy, that our deepest sympathies can only be evoked by the most devastating catastrophies.

Works Cited:

New York Times

Boston Globe