IELTS Band 6 Essay | Opinion | Society
News editors decide what to broadcast on television and what to print in newspapers. What factors do you think influence these decisions? Do we become used to bad news? Would it he better if more good news was reported?
Submitted on: Thu Sep 26 2024
It has often been said that “Good news is bad news” because it does not sell
newspapers. A radio station that once decided to present only good news soon
found that it had gone out of business for lack of listeners. Bad news on the other
hand is so common that in order to cope with it, we often simply ignore it. We have
become immune to bad news and the newspapers and radio stations are aware of
this.
While newspapers and TV stations may aim to report world events accurately, be
they natural or human disasters, political events or the horrors of war, it is also
true that their main objective is to sell newspapers and attract listeners and
viewers to their stations. For this reason TV and radio stations attempt to reflect
the flavour of their station by providing news broadcasts tailormade to suit their
listeners’ preferences. Programmes specialising in pop music or TV soap operas
focus more on local news, home issues and uptodate traffic reports. The more
serious stations and newspapers like to provide “so called” objective news reports
with editorial comment aimed at analysing the situation.
If it is true, then, that newspapers and TV stations are tailoring their news to their
readers’ and viewers’ requirements, how can they possibly be reporting real
world events in an honest and objective light? Many radio and TV stations do, in
fact, report items of good news but they no longer call this news. They refer to
these as human interest stories and package them in programmes specialising,
for instance, in consumer affairs or local issues. Good news now comes to us in
the form of documentaries the fight against children’s cancer or AIDS, or the
latest developments in the fight to save the planet from environmental pollution.
- Task Achievement: 6
- Coherence And Cohesion: 5
- Lexical Resource: 6
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy: 6
Feedback: This essay demonstrates good understanding of the task and provides relevant information. The structure is clear, but the language is sometimes repetitive and could be more varied. The essay could benefit from stronger arguments and more specific examples. Consider developing a clear thesis statement and supporting it with evidence from the text.
