In reality the news nowadays is more pigeonholed on some preconceived ideas that are not always true, the news that make it to the media always provoke a certain group of people. The minorities are always on the news for the wrong reasons, the newsmakers never care to dig deep and uncover the truth. They have this attitude that as long as they are selling news, there is nothing more important. They fail to consider the people who get hurt with this type of reporting. Nowadays news is controlled by people who only care about the ratings, and nothing more. We cannot overlook what happened to Wu on that fateful day, the media had its part in portraying them in a bad way and this never helped to solve the case, or the underlying problem.
The media is filled with stories of crime and violence, and frequently those images are associated with; minority, the Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Italians. These gory images appear on television many times such that we have come accustomed to them, which are very wrong, the media should be at the forefront condemning such tendencies and making sure that nothing like this ever happens to other people. The local news in every metropolitan area, where the mixed races reside, accounts a large number of violence and crime to minority. News people depict life in the US as dangerous and violent. In addition, most of the Whites attribute these violent and criminal acts to Blacks. As much as television tries to carry out messages that affirm the value of being together and everybody is equal, crime is squarely blamed on Blacks. Such bad media depiction of a certain race contributes to these types of crimes to go unpunished.
The story of Wu and Qu fell to the same fate; the depiction of two Asian students who have come to America not to further their studies but to show off is a pity. The news went viral and spread to their homeland and even people there started not to believe them, they never thought that this story was race related. The media depicting these two Chinese men as spoiled rich kids was wrong and should never be repeated.
A good liberal model of how to show news is supposed to be introduced, principled journalism is the only way to defeat wrong, biased reporting. In the book Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics By Daniel C. Hallin, Paolo Mancini, highlights the way media should report their news. In this book, it has introduced many forms of analysis and suggested the way they can be combined to get the best out of our news. Proper media systems can prove to be the solution to our problems. Commercialism and professionalism in the US media is not going the way it is supposed to go, for example, the media can make use of field research so that when they are doing a case study they can be able to come up with the best news that portrays the facts. This will go a long way in improving the interaction of the media and the people. The book has provided plenty of ideas on how to deal with news that relate to the minority and how to be able to tell their stories in a manner that will seem fair. A model like the one the Liberal Model portrayed in the book shows that this type of model will have a more global influence. The reason being that globalization and neoliberals is spreading all over the world, this trend is continuing to diffuse liberal media ideas and structures.
The media is also portraying ideas that make us look back to history and relive the progressive era days, most of the basic values of the reformist agenda still exist up to today. The progressive movement is long gone and dead but the media is somehow portraying it in the way they are covering certain events. Journalism is now more akin to the progressive idea of individualism; it supports this idea in a way that is causing uneasiness to most people because of how equivalent it is to a progressive mindset. This idea opposes socialism and prefers capitalism, the ideology behind the media of today can be easily put as right liberalism or left conservative.
The most depicted type of violence in our news are associated with guns, accidents, murder, explosions, child abuse and many other forms of violence. A research showed that local news average nearly seven violent items per show. The research showed that 58% of the violent items were associated with serious criminal acts of violence, while 22% depicted those violent items as murders. Many researchers have also found that similar depiction and emphasis on violence, is unbalanced in relation to the reality on the ground.
The media biasness in reporting and educating people on the systems that are put in place to curb this violence is almost zero. Only about 5% of such stories are aired, this shows how media has gone wrong. Such programs that report on how to control violence are not given much airtime because they are not considered as news sellers. Media believes that viewing violent programs leads to audiences but in fact, they are just victimizing the whole society. In addition, the racial subtext in the news is also biased; like in Chicago, news links Blacks to many violent stories.
Approximately equal number of Whites commit crimes as Blacks (173 versus 179), but the news depicts Blacks to commit more crimes and the real reason is they are more or less the same. The only difference is the fact that their population proportion is in excess considering the number of crimes committed. Other research also showed that the length of time a story that featured a Black victim was far much less than a story that involved a White victim, the ratio was 106 seconds to 185 seconds.
The story of Wu and Qu is a sad story that should serve as a lesson to all media stations, these two USC students violently killed and framed as spoiled rich kids should never reoccur in this world. The two victims of racial crime were just heading home after finishing their lab experiment, their lives violently cut shot by people who were never after their money or car as put by the media. The media coverage never allowed the parents of the deceased to mourn their loved ones; the filth projected by the news was shocking and unprofessional. The distortion of the details of the news was at the lowest level, instead of concentrating on the murder, the media was more into the BMW. The value of the car was more important and the exaggerated figure of $60, 000 was what the media felt it would suite the story. This was all a robbery or a failed carjacking of two rich kids, that is what the news depicted but the harsh truth was never revealed. The society has become so susceptible to these antics by the media and in a way brainwashed them. News coverage should improve to avoid such scenarios.