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KANSAN.COM | THURSDAY, MARCH 31, 2016
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Are you campus wifi? Because I'd really like to hit you with some construction equipment.
Setting an alarm for 6 am, then 7, then 8. It's 9:23 am and I'm still in bed
Is there another word for the word "word"
7:30 AM enrollment is for freshmen. I'm a senior. I have important sleeping to
Editor's Note: term name, expression designation, locution vocable, appellation
@KANSANNEWS
KANSAN.NEWS
/THEKANSAN
When u think u got a text but u actually just accidentally turned on Siri
@UNIVERSITY
DAILYKANSAN
When I turned my car on, the music was so loud I almost whimpered.
Just drove away from the gas station with the gas pump still in my car... All time low.
More unsubstantiated information...
The founding fathers didn't wear underwear. Pass it on
Twas the night without wifi and all through the house, not a connection was stirring,nobody moved a mouse.
YOU CAN DO THE THING!
Illustration by Jake Kaufmann/KANSAN
Panda bears eat roughly 14 hours a day. Why was I not born a panda? I'd fit right in
It figures that the Internet would go down when I actually have work to do.
Wishing I had millions of dollars so I could buy the Han Solo leather jacket that Harrison Ford is auctioning off
Mikinski: Breaking news coverage lacks clarity and misses the mark on accuracy
▶ MADDY MIKINSKI
@Miss_Maddy
on October 30,1938 mass panic swept the nation. Amer-
the nation. Americans fled their homes in search of safety and gas masks. They packed the freeways, trying to escape chaos in New York. In Indianapolis, a woman interrupted an evening church service, telling them, "New York has been destroyed! It's the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!"
This was the day Orson Welles (who would go on to direct "Citizen Kane") presented his reinterpretation
of H.G. Wells' novel "War of the Worlds." The life-like breaking news broadcast tracked an alien invasion targeting New York. Listeners tuning in after the program's introduction were tricked into believing that the world was over and aliens were attacking.
Though Welles' program was fictional, the panic caused by "War of the Worlds" teaches us a valuable lesson on breaking news and its repercussions.
The 1930s were considered the golden age of radio. Today, radio has been overtaken, according to a 2015 American Press Institute study, by local and network news. When global breaking news happens, research suggests Americans turn to broadcast news organizations such as CNN, Fox and MSNBC to get the scood.
attacks, the first major international news event we remember, were covered by breaking news. A quick Google search can bring up live coverage of the World Trade Center from CNN, FOX and NBC. Though some of the videos are almost two hours long, they only show a small portion of the total coverage that day.
Today's college students have grown up surrounded by breaking news. The 9/11
Breaking news in the modern era tends to last for hours. News anchors and phone-in eyewitnesses heap speculation on top of itself until the facts are almost indistinguishable from the fallacy.
During coverage of the 2012 Aurora, Colo. movie theater shooting, ABC News was forced to apologize after mistaking shooter James Holmes for an Aurora resident and incorrectly linking him to the Tea Party. In April of that same year, CNN and many other news outlets drew criticism
Viewers who have time to sit down and watch hours of breaking news coverage may be able to see corrections and retractions. Viewers who only catch 20 minutes of breaking news coverage will most likely walk away with incorrect facts. Like in the "War of the Worlds," if viewers miss the context, they'll walk away knowing less than when they tuned in.
for incorrectly reporting that an arrest had been made in the Boston Bombing case.
Craig Silverman, who rups the Poynter blog "Regret the Error," has what he calls the Law of Incorrect Tweets. Silverman's law states that "initial, inaccurate information will be retweeted more than any subsequent correction."
In other words, inaccurate information will always be more widely received than any attempts to correct it. This is something
we're taught in journalism classes, and maybe it's something network news services would do well to remember.
Instead of pushing out unsubstantiated information to an audience who won't stick around to see it rectified, network news outlets should be more discerning with the speculations they throw out as fact.
Untrue, sensational information, as seen in Orson Welles' broadcast, has the power to create monumental ripples in its audience. When covering breaking news, networks should keep in mind just how much their statements can be misconstrued and blown out of proportion.
Maddy Mikinski is a senior from Linwood studying English and journalism.
- Edited by Shane Jackson
Issawi: We attempt to make our lives seem more interesting on social media than they are
► DANYA ISSAWI
@danyasawi
In 1997, entrepreneur Philippe Kahn created the first-ever camera phone. Kahn's revolutionary invention stemmed from a simple desire to easily capture photos of his newborn baby; and what a long way we've come in the nearly 20 years that followed. The camera phone has become amorphous- constantly changing in the form of increased megapixels and
front-facing cameras in an attempt to keep up with the recent uptick in popularity of photo sharing on social media platforms.
Social media may very well be the greatest invention and inconvenience we have ever conceived. Don't get me wrong- I am a huge proponent of social media use. Not only has this newly conceptualized virtual world created a smaller, global community and made communication easier, but it has also created an entirely new sector of jobs for millennials.
We've slowly but surely stripped away our humanity in an attempt to advertise the best version of ourselves on social media. We Photoshop, lighten, tighten
But, the double-edged sword that comes with such constant, external exposure cannot be ignored.
and erase every flaw and imperfection until each image is pristine. No longer do we use pictures to capture moments, but rather, we create moments to capture pictures - staging candid, laughing pictures with friends or a serene moment, staring at the sunset, on the beach.
We've become brands, competing against one another to create the farthest outreach (aka the greatest amount of likes), until eventually we begin competing against ourselves, and our true, organic state of being is no longer enough. Images that barely resemble us plaster our walls, news feeds and manifest an image of the version of ourselves we want people to see, and maybe who we truly wish we could be.
Famed Instagram model
Essena O'Neill recently
deleted her account, which garnered hundreds of thousands of followers, on the popular photo-sharing platform for this reason, claiming her account had no longer become about her, but had rather become a source of "contrived perfection made to get attention." This compulsion to make our lives seem more interesting has become an overwhelming and unnecessary source of competition. But at the end of the day, perpetuating a manipulated image of oneself becomes exhausting, and the gap between who we are in the real world and our persona in the virtual world widens, and we lose ourselves in space in-between.
Yes, social media portraits a portion of who we are, but only the sliver we allow people to see. In a sense, we've become slaye-
to the system - in a constant state of photo-taking, photo-editing and photo-sharing. It's become natural to watch an awe-inspiring sunset or gawk at a plate of savory food and wonder what it would look like through the lens of an Instagram filter, but once we control that urge to reach into our pockets, pull out our phones and snap a picture, then maybe we can break free from the system. Maybe life can stop being so mechanic and mundane, and we can begin to accept ourselves in our natural state of being and truly enjoy fleeting moments rather than stress about capturing them within the confines of a couple million pixels.
Danya Issawi is a sophomore from Kansas City studying journalism.
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vickyde.kansan.com
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THE KANSAN EDITORIAL BOARD
Members of the Kansan Editorial Board are Vicky Diaz-Camacho, Kate Miller, Gage Brock and Maddy Mikinski
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