Vanguard Voice vs Mainstream News

The Vanguard Voice has been around for many years, informing students about topics like sports, opinions, and general news. The same can be said for other newspapers that are more established and well-known like The New York Times or The Washington Post, for example.

However, the difference between these established, popular newspapers and our very own Vanguard newspaper is the news featured on every new edition of the paper.

For the most part, The Vanguard Voice has informative, fun, and light-hearted stories featured in every new edition. Meanwhile other newspapers feature stories that are more serious and intense. For example, mainstream newspapers always feature stories about violent crime such as robberies, and murders, and other topics that are controversial such as politics.

It has been debated amongst people for quite some time whether news that primarily talks about crime and controversial topics is necessary or not. Many studies have been done on people who constantly consume news, and it has been shown that about half of all Americans say the news causes them unwanted and unnecessary stress.

Additionally, about 70% of Americans believe that the news they consume is blown out of proportion; the Laguna Treatment Hospital said in a study.

All of this is not to say that the consumption of news is a bad thing. Reading the news can be important, or even fun in some situations; however, the majority of people agree that constant news consumption is negatively impacting their mental health.

In my own experience, I have found this all to be true. I sometimes think to myself, why doesn’t the news cover more happy stories, some lighthearted and harmless topics similar to this campus newspaper, The Vanguard Voice? The issue might lie with how newspapers are run.

Ultimately, mainstream newspapers are a business. They make a profit from views and advertisements that millions of people see daily. Meanwhile, The Vanguard Voice doesn’t run as a profit business. Instead, we are a student-run, non-profit newspaper, with the only motivation for writing news being to share our voices with whoever chooses to read the latest edition of the paper.

I have also observed that many non-profit and campus newspapers don’t blow headlines out of proportion to get more clicks because there’s no need for them to do so. Additionally, these newspapers also don’t have much coverage on daily crime, and most political stories are simply opinions, instead of trying to make something horrible sound like fact.

Most for-profit newspapers excel in the art of clickbait; making a post on their website that is blown out of proportion because that will mean more people click on the article and thus the news company makes more money from all the extra, panicked clicks.

It is really unfortunate that most mainstream, for-profit news, has been considered by many to be unnecessary, stress-inducing, and biased. Meanwhile, other news sources that don’t run for profit, and publish stories more focused on opinions and light-hearted news, don’t get much attention from the general public.

Perhaps it would be better if people tuned in to more light-hearted news stories, or advocated more stress-free news stories on the mainstream news.