Media Critique

WHAS 11 recently posted a story entitled, “Louisville Women Loses State Fair Blue Ribbon,” under the National News section on the official WHAS 11 website. ( www.whas11.com/news/national/275663511.html ) This story is about a Louisville women who was caught in a scandal during a baking contest, because her recipe was composed of a store bought crust. This article, although intriguing has no relevance to a local crowd of people let alone a national crowd, in which this piece was categorized under. This is an example of breaking two of the seven yardsticks of journalism and one of the nine principles of journalism. 

The first yardstick that was broken was newsworthiness. To make sure a story is newsworthy the questions a person must ask themselves are if the topic is core or peripheral, and will it have a lasting effect for a decent amount of people. This story fails to positively answer any of those questions. This topic is not core or peripheral nor will it have a long lasting effect on people, because the fact that a women got a blue ribbon revoked does not effect anybody outside of the competition in which she competed in. 

The second yardstick being broken is local relevance. Local relevance asks how your article effects the audience that the story is being distributed to. This story for example is being distributed nationally and just as was mentioned previously, does not effect anybody nationally besides the few other bakers who participated in the contest, therefore there is no relevance for any of the citizens that have the opportunity to read this article. 

The principle of journalism that was broken by WHAS 11 posting this article was make the important interesting. As shown above this story has no real relevance to a relevant mass of people, and this article is not important at all considering the other current events that are being discussed. WHAS 11 is trying to make this minor (but interesting) scandal sound much bigger and more important than it is, and WHAS 11 especially breaks this principle of journalism by making this story national news which it should not be.

This article obviously does not meet the standards that are needed for it to proper journalism, but if WHAS wanted to post this story, they could categorize it under entertainment instead of national news.