Some people believe that today the world is more dangerous than it’s ever been. I disagree. I think that as a society we have become more aware of the dangerous events that take place in our world due to the increase in negative news coverage. Lately, there’s been an  increase of media coverage of negative things, such as kidnappings, rape and murder. The only way to combat this is to also increase coverage of positive events.

There have been countless school shootings across the globe. Yet more recently everyone has been focused on the Parkland shooting. Why is this? Because of social media and the massive amounts of people who use it, it is easier for the students who were affected by Parkland to raise awareness about gun laws and the tragedy they went through. In the late 1990s the first version of social media was invented. People typically heard about events from word of mouth or watching the news. As of today there are millions of people across the globe who use social media, such as Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat.

In 2012 the first school shooting at Sandy Hook caused the death of 20 elementary school students. Personally, because of a difference in news coverage this one did not stick with me as much as the more recent Parkland shooting. In 2018 the Parkland shooting took place resulting in 17 deaths. Without social media coverage, I would have never known.

In the year 1928, Christine Collins’s son went missing after going to the movies. She reported the disappearance to the police, and they ended up finding the wrong boy and tried to convince her that he was her son. She wasn’t convinced, and after many conflicts with the police it was discovered that her son was possibly murdered. She, however, was not convinced and searched for her son until the day she died. A movie was made about this in 2008. Without this movie, I would have never known.

In 2015, Dee Dee Blanchard was murdered by her daughter, Gypsy Rose. Dee Dee suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder where a parent or caretaker exaggerates, fabricates or induces the illness of a person in their care in order to gain sympathy from others. A documentary came out on Hulu in 2019. Without the documentary, I never would have known about it.

All of this has a point. Yes these events did happen, and they were terrible, but the only reason that we know about some of these is due to their news, movie and social media coverage. If you turn on the news, more than likely you will hear about the bad events happening in the world, such as murder and kidnapping. The reason for this is because bad news is typically more eye catching than good news. Seeing stories about murder and kidnappings in your area will more likely grab your attention and make you want to watch the news giving the network more views. In the future, I don’t want to look back on the past and only remember the negative things that the media I covered. I want to be able to say I remember the positive such as Fox59 raising money to help feed hungry Hoosiers.

So see, the world is not becoming more dangerous, the world is just getting more bad news coverage due to the increase of attention it gets versus positive news. 

The world needs to cover more of the good news so we are not constantly surrounded by negativity.