Essays on Sensationalist

The case of Meredith Kercher’s murder in Perugia, Italy became a very sensationalist story due to the involvement of an American young woman, Amanda Knox, who represented both America’s sweetheart, being young and beautiful, and Italy’s black widow, due to her associations with sexual promiscuity and drugs. While no clear evidence was ever found to ink her and her Italian boyfriend to the murder, they were imprisoned, together with a Black man, Rudy Guede, whose drug-related activities quickly turned the media against him. In this high-profile case, the issues of privilege and diversity had a great ...

Mark Twain’s short story, “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper”, is a humorous criticism of journalistic standards during Twain’s time. Twain was concerned with the lack of truth telling in journalism especially the way reporters and editors conducted themselves. The use of humor as a device was employed by Twain to mask his misgivings against the journalistic conduct of the day. Mark Twain’s concern was that sensationalism coupled with the lack of editorial competence was eroding the power of journalism. Using Booth’s ideas on the function of rhetoric in fiction, this paper seeks to analyze ...

It is difficult to pinpoint where the decline of modern journalism began to slide down the perilous chute towards sensationalism and garbage news, but what is certain is that at this current time the industry needs a new start. From what is covered and what is considered to be newsworthy the world has been steered again and again towards increasingly inane and nonsensical material. That which is considered news is easily likened to a mudslinging contest in a grade-school playground, or a smear campaign devised by a high school student to become the most popular. Journalism has become less ...