Staff Editorial: Newsworthy or Nonsense?

“Back in my day people used to care about what happened in the world, we would read the newspaper for the news, not the gossip columns.” Sounds like something your grandparents would say, but honestly that’s how we feel it should still be. Unfortunately that is not the case in today’s America.

In this day and age, people care much more about the relationships and happenings in celebrity life than they do about newsworthy things that are happening internationally and even across the country.

It is thanks to this generation being brought up in this culture that worships at the feet of the entertainment industry and thinks the Lady Gagas of the world are more important than NATO and the United Nations. Many don’t know what NATO even stands for.

People will pay attention to a newsworthy event as long as there’s no award show, celebrity breakup or celebrity death that has happened in recent times to overshadow it. It helps if news pops up on their Twitter feeds.

For example, last year tragedy struck the country of Norway when a man went on a shooting spree in the city of Oslo. There was an outcry throughout the world about the shooting and even Americans took notice…for about a day. Then the next day it was reported that singer Amy Winehouse had passed away and then all of the news coverage and tweets shifted from an actual newsworthy event to the death of a celebrity.

The American people are not totally to blame though, it is as much the media’s fault as it is the people’s fault. Currently there is a civil war raging in Syria and riots tearing apart Athens, and the lack of media coverage is unbelievable. Again though, this isn’t the people’s fault if they don’t know about it.

Americans are trained from a very young age to aspire to be and idolize these celebrities. Why would we want to worry about a few thousand people being murdered internationally a celebrity has died? These days, it’s hard to tell what’s newsworthy and what’s nonsense.