SAT Essay Saturday: Has a shift in communication resulted in people being less informed?

I am going to attempt to write an example essay for each Saturday using the ideas from previous real SAT Essay Prompts. As always these will be written in 25 minutes, so judge them accordingly. My first tip in regards to the essay it to ignore the quotation. It often leads students astray and the Assignment is the idea you are expected to respond to. So save your time for writing and just read the prompt first.

Assignment: Has a shift in communication resulted in people being less informed? 

It could be said that the news died on July 17, 2009. That was the day when Walter Cronkite died at the age of 92. Cronkite was the CBS news anchor throughout the height of broadcast news and garnered the moniker “The Most Trusted Man in America” because of his journalistic ethics and honesty. From the Kennedy Assassination to the Lunar Landing, Americans tuned in to see and hear what Cronkite had to say, but with today’s 500 channels and 24 hour news there isn’t one person to whom everyone turns. Instead Americans are fed snippets of facts surrounded by the fluff of entertainment, sports and weather. The amount and variety of information seems vaster but in actuality it is just a sliver of the news our grandparents were privy to every night at 6 and 11.

During the 1950’s-1970’s the pattern was the same throughout households across America; everyone turned on the television at 6 o’clock to learn the news of the day. For one hour, an anchor guided viewers through the events that were shaping the world. These events were thoroughly researched and written by professionals who looked to deliver the truth of events and provide a good overview. For the most part these stories were told with a dispassionate point of view and the journalists strove to provide all sides of the issues. People had a favourite news anchor and they tuned in to get the real news nightly from a trusted anchor.

However, the news of today is much different from that of the past. When people watch them at 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 or 11 p.m., most news broadcasts have been truncated to 30 minutes, during which the news of Brad and Angelina’s latest trip to Disneyland is next to the latest casualty in Afghanistan. The entertainment portion of the broadcast outweighs the hard news and this leads to the news being clipped down to 20 second sound bites and headlines alone. There is no depth and certainly no opportunity to have the other point of view. The erosion of the news broadcast has led to people learning less about the world and more about Britney Spear’s custody arrangements.

The way information or the news is disseminated is shifting again with the rise of the internet and social networks such as Twitter. Instead of from a journalist, we are gathering our news from the Blogger who tweeted the latest about Obama’s tax plan. The amount of news and the depth of that news are dwindling daily and the noise of celebrity gossip and “Reality” TV is overpowering the information that will inform us of events in the world that may actually affect our lives.