What’s Important Doesn’t Always Make the News

When I was a child, I thought anything important that happened was shown on the TV news, and anything that wasn’t on the news wasn’t important.

I learned the truth as a teen at a summer journalism camp at Northwestern University (yes, I was a Cherub). We took a field trip downtown to visit a Chicago TV station, and there we watched several people sitting around a table discussing what would be on the news that night. It was all up to them to decide what to report (and what not to report) to the millions of people in Chicagoland. Hmmmm…..

A few years later, I worked as an editor on my college newspaper, where I collected news stories off the wire and we determined which ones were important enough to make the next day’s edition, and which ones weren’t. Hmmmm……

And now I watch as the media celebrates women who are so angry that they dress as body parts (NSFW), a dirty old woman who threatened the White House but wasn’t arrested for it as others have been, a young woman who thinks it’s important to show the world that (shock!) women menstruate, and I think, Hmmmm…

Why don’t they ever cover the women who work hard each day at a job, raising children or both?

What about older women who care for grandchildren, or others in their families and communities? Why are they so rarely noticed?

And I’m reminded once again that those in the media choose not to notice. So it’s up to us to notice such people even though the powerful American media ignore them.

“…whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8)