Hi everyone and welcome back to a reflective weekly blog post. This past week I wrote another essay, however, this one could be about anything I wanted. I gathered many of my previous notes from Craft together and formed a topic that I am passionate about. I wrote about how the media exploits people’s obsession with shocking events and tragedies to increase polarization and radicalization. I see this happen all the time in my life, especially with people on social media, and it bothers me to see the media be so “evil” in my opinion.

The day I’m writing this blog post, Saturday June 12, an example of the exact phenomenon I wrote about, took place on a large scale. Christian Eriksen, a soccer player from Denmark went into cardiac arrest during the middle of a European Championship game against Finland. The scale of the event resulted in millions of people across the world watching live as he collapsed on the field. Eriksen lay unconscious, essentially dead on the field for 20 minutes with medics miraculously saving his life, while his teammates blocked the view of the invasive media. Eriksen was defibrillated and brought to hospital where he was stabilized and is now feeling fine while examinations are being done to find out what exactly happened.

One of the worst parts of this situation was the awful media coverage. Not only did they show the initial collapse, but they kept showing live coverage, instead of giving the player privacy. This may have been extremely traumatizing to viewers, I spoke to my brother who was watching live and he said it left him feeling horrified, and in shock and anger at what he was seeing. If the medics hadn’t have been able to bring him back, the media would have made a special story about a death live on tv. It is not ok for anyone in the situation, the player, his family, the viewers, or even the broadcasters.

The media needs to stop abusing these situations for money. The more shocking of an event the more views and therefore more money, but there has to be a moral line. This shouldn’t have been on tv, and on thousands of news stories. In our increasingly connected world, we need to remain ethical when disturbing events such as this take place.