When ideas need to be sold and there are an overabundance of suppliers, sensationalism is used by journalists, politicians, and news media to emphasize the extremes of language, and excite people toward a specific side without explanation as to why. History shows that numerous companies ignorantly make outrageous claims about their products in commercials, many presidential candidates proclaim amazing things they can do for America, while insisting other candidates would only make the country worse, and news reporters often blindly inform about the latest threats to human life. News stations are so oversaturated with the extremes of language that words may begin to lose meaning. While most journalists use outrage or euphoria to get views, the
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Steve Oney, author of And The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, in his Nieman Reports article, “Murder Trials and Media Sensationalism,” documents the story of a young child laborer in Atlanta who was mysteriously murdered, and analyzes the resulting newspaper frenzy in which multiple publishers attempted to propel themselves into success by unjustly taking advantage of the sensitive tragedy. These tactics include showing a picture of the victim’s dead body on the front page, offering $500 in reward for “exclusive information leading to the perpetrator’s arrest and conviction,” and manipulating small facts to produce drama, such as describing an interview to have taken place in a “torrential down-pour,” while years later the reporter confessed “It wasn’t raining, but it might have been” (63-64). There had been so much conflicting “facts” from the opposing newspapers that sources themselves began to mix up what was real and what was fiction. The profit-hungry motivations of these newspapers led them to elongate the tragedy through undeniably corrupt methods of language
Steve Oney, author of And The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, in his Nieman Reports article, “Murder Trials and Media Sensationalism,” documents the story of a young child laborer in Atlanta who was mysteriously murdered, and analyzes the resulting newspaper frenzy in which multiple publishers attempted to propel themselves into success by unjustly taking advantage of the sensitive tragedy. These tactics include showing a picture of the victim’s dead body on the front page, offering $500 in reward for “exclusive information leading to the perpetrator’s arrest and conviction,” and manipulating small facts to produce drama, such as describing an interview to have taken place in a “torrential down-pour,” while years later the reporter confessed “It wasn’t raining, but it might have been” (63-64). There had been so much conflicting “facts” from the opposing newspapers that sources themselves began to mix up what was real and what was fiction. The profit-hungry motivations of these newspapers led them to elongate the tragedy through undeniably corrupt methods of language