If the media only reports negative incidents of child welfare bureaucracies/agencies...?

Question

...which by the way causes a "foster care panic," aka a spike in number of placements, due to community hypervigilance...which leads to the already overwhelmed workers becoming more overburdened...

Why do these reporters/editors think that the safety of the children under the care of said agency will improve, as a result of their pushlished pieces? Child welfare deals with individual people, not products, not academic theories. If this position is stated by the reporter (of actually caring about the kids), as the reason behind his/her motive to sensationalize child deaths, its bullshit. Child welfare is such an easy target to slam because there is no standard way to measure how a beaurocracy in one city compares to another. It seems like reporters enjoy taking cheap shots at the expense of these children's misfortunate situations, to get ratings during sweeps or improve readership. I'm sick of it. Why don't reporters ever focus on positive stories of children saved?

I'm guess I need to be more clear. Im talking specifically about the media always naysaying the child welfare system. There is this public expectation that the system is always super flawed and needing to be fixed. How do we fix it. I guess reporters could be more...progressive? Thanks for your opinions and comments :)

Answer 1

It is true that it is the nature of the beast to report the negative. However, to use your term, the fact is that these agencies ARE "superflawed". I believe that in this case the media is spot on. Perhaps the spotlight would't be on these various Child Protective Services agencies if they stopped losing children, and allowing children to remain in homes where there is clear evidence of abuse. You suggest perhaps that these thing be ignored and these problems be left unchecked? The spotlight forces reform. The solution does not lie with NOT reporting these problems. It lies with the beaurocracies that do not know how to deal with them or are not equipped to handle them because they are underfunded and therefore understaffed. THAT then means the problem lies with the government. Again, in this case, the media is doing an appropriate job. They should not be blamed for exposing the fact that the government and these agencies are not doing theirs.

Answer 2

The new stations are not interested in who the help or harm, they are interested in ratings. The way they do that is to deliver shocking news that make people think how terrible a situation is.

If they really cared about you or the viewers, do you think you would see there clips through the day such as "There is an escaped killer on the loose and we will tell you where tonight at 7pm". If they cared about you they wouldn't make you wait.

ROAN, when people like you ask these questions, it makes a statement. In Detroit, some of the new media outlets are starting to have very small segments of positive action items such as you are describing. I would not expect the National media outlets to be proactive, however in your community, you can make the change. Send a letter to the editor and ask them to help come up with a solution to a problem. They might surprise you and show up at your door.

Answer 3

There not going to focus on soft stories and unfortunately children being saved is soft news, and soft news don't bring in big ratings, because we all know big ratings tranlates into big dollars and that's all these media outlets are concerned about. This is a sad situation but this applies to alot of media outlets.

Answer 4

Negativity is the nature of the "media" beast.
Feel good or posititive stories are not a priority in their industrty, afterall they have to put the stuff out there to make folks want to tune in. Unfortunately we live in a society conditioned to react/respond to Sex, Violence, and/or Negativity.