A number of years ago, I sat watching the evening news, and when I started flipping channels, I wondered why ABC, CBS and NBC all had the same items on the screen.

They weren’t always the most important happenings around the globe. And they had different heads doing the talking, but the words they spouted off basically were the same.

If one reporter said Prince Harry said XYZ, the others said it, too. One and a half hours of news and it all boiled down to less than 30 minutes for the entire day and the lives of six billion people.
I really wondered what else was going on in the world that we never heard about.

Why was it important that one of the Kardashians got a nose job or Honey Boo Boo’s mother made a crude remark to her neighbor?

Was I an idiot, or why didn’t I understand why a story focusing on some moron who felt that sticking a flare in his mouth and lighting it was vastly more important than starving people in Sudan?

I began to see why friends made sure they read the news from across the world and ignored the media in the United States, because in the U.S., we seemed to never really know what was going on — at least we seemed never to be told what really was going on. We never had a handle on what news really was.

This raised the issue of the media reporting the news or creating it.

When one looks at a variety of definitions of the news, we see a few interesting things. In some cases, news simply is called a report of a recent event, or noteworthy information recently received.

In other cases, it’s a person, thing or event considered as a choice subject for journalistic treatment.

But exactly how choice is Honey Boo Boo’s mother or any of the Kardashians?

For news to be called important, or even to be called news, it has to be reported. I guess if I never see it in print or hear Billy, Bobby or Sally present it to me, then it must not be news. Starving people, people swept away by floods and AIDS victims in Africa do not exist until a talking head or a keyboard-banging blogger tells me.

The news then is created and fed to me. And if the decision to not run the story is made, the news dies on the vine, long before it even can be called news.

Journalists seem to be hung up on believing they are the only purveyors of truth and that everything they report says it all.

But news is not the event, the person or the thing. News is the reporting of those pieces, and in that reporting comes the creation.

Getting the right angle for that shot of Obama to make him look slightly crazy or reporting that Romney loves to fire people without any clarification of what that means or emphasizing the strange eyes of Michele Bachmann — the media create the atmosphere into which these tidbits of information are placed.

They do not report; they create what the public sees and then believes.

Perhaps this is why we have reached a time when people find Twitter, texting and Facebook so fantastic.

It is instantaneously created news. These media create everything from the biased views of politicians, to the justifications of the bullying of senior citizens, to you name it, and it quickly is reported. It is the “news.”

The time has come to start looking more closely at the brand of stuff that gets thrown at us from the world around us.

Did Benghazi in Libya and the death of Americans happen as the news presented it?

Did Mitt Romney really cut the hair off a classmate? Wasn’t Barack Obama really born in the United States?

Or was all of this just “news”?

Craig Gunn is a guest columnist at The State News and an academic specialist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Reach him at gunn@egr.msu.edu.