Trinidad Media Sensationalism

This has been bugging me for years, I just never spoke about it, but I’m totally fedup of it now : media sensationalism.

For the past 5-6 years, all of the front page stories and headlines on most of the daily newspapers are either the following :

1) Doom and gloom reporting about a murder/suicide/robbery/death/crime

2) Politics and speculation

I mean, New York City, and pretty much every major city and country in the world have murders every day, and on a much larger scale than Trinidad. What if the reporters and editors of the newspapers here in Trinidad worked at the New York Times, etc? Would the newspaper just be one big obituary column? A murder is news, it is worth reporting, but why is it being featured as the most important thing to have happened for an entire day? Are the editors and reporters of these newspapers some sort of gothic, nihilists hell-bent on subconsciously depressing anyone who glances at the headlines?

Yesterday and today is no different as the big headline for the Guardian is “Bullets Fly At UWI”

The headline is suggestive that there was gunplay ON the UWI campus. If you read the article however you’ll see that no such thing happened. The entire incident took place off-campus. Yes it was NEAR UWI, but there is a profound difference in reporting that something occurred somewhere when in fact it occurred closeby :

A shoot-out ensued between the suspect and Estate Constable Roger Plaza, who was shot in the right leg. He was pursued by Assistant Superintendent Estate Police Berment, following which another shoot-out ensued along College Road.

College Road is NOT on the UWI campus. Its cool that the UWI police got some action and shot guys and stuff though.

This is no bad choice of words, using “at” instead of “nearby”, it is a conscious, National Enquirer-esque theme of most Trinidad newspapers where the truth is twisted as much as possible in order for you to purchase the paper and begin reading the article.

For what its worth, I found this section of the story particularly funny :

After the shooting, witnesses gathered at the scene and called on the police to kill the suspect. “They distressing people… Kill him! Kill him!” one man shouted.

Lol. “Kill him” he says. Seeing that they make up headlines, there is no way to know if that actually happened anyway.