Afghan Children, Caught in Fire & Killed

Click here for (not so full) story

Early Thursday, firefight broke out between insurgents and Australian troops in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan Province resulting in at least five Afghan children dead, two Afghan children injured, and two Afghan adults injured. The source of this terrible news abroad? – a news release a full day later from Australia’s Defense Ministry…the ones who killed and injured the children. In class on Friday, we discussed “manufactured news” which is news released in the form of press/news releases to media sources explaining what happened in a situation. But the fact that this “news” is filtered information of what the killers want to tell the world is not the point of this blog, however the need to point it out is there.

This news story was one of the top international news stories on cnn.com today, yet the entire write-up was shorter than this blog entry. That’s right, it was a mere 193 words long. Why was this article so short? Was it because that was all that was provided by the news release? If so, why not add a little background information on the subject to fully inform readers? Or was there more to the release, but that is all that CNN is willing to share with it’s readers? If the latter is the case, then what are you keeping from us, CNN? In either case, the fact remains that this story (and mainly the history that has lead to it), is arguably important to keep the globe informed about what is happening with each countries’ troops abroad.

Smith would suggest that this story was kept so short because news media outlets are constantly avoiding “hard news” stories that are tough and complicated for the average reader to wrap their heads around and completely understand (Smith 281.) Smith says that only 8% of combined areas of news covered on prime-time are areas of education, economics, foreign affairs, the military, national security, politics, and social welfare (Smith 282.) And although cnn.com has an entire section of their website devoted to World News, the majority of the stories found there are rarely as long as all of the articles found in the Entertainment, Travel, and Living sections, referred to by Smith as “soft news”. Smith suggests that the change from more more hard news to more soft news is because the news is essentially a consumer product, and to keep the consumer happy, you must not constantly bring down their news with dead children in Afghanistan, but rather tell them the top ten Caribbean destinations for families in a recession.