I hate it when the media exhausts a story, talking about the same issues over and over only with different angles. Almost as bad as radio stations over-playing your favorite song until you don’t like it anymore, journalists and public relations professionals sometimes take an insignificant story, blow it out of proportion, and obsessively talk about it for weeks.
That being said, I think there are some circumstances where stories need to be blown up and talked about for a while, so people can really understand the depth and importance in the issue.
One such example I’ve noticed recently was the domestic abuse case between rapper Chris Brown and pop singer girlfriend, Rihanna. A little over a month ago, the night before the Grammy Awards, Brown beat Rihanna in the front seats of his car to the point where she suffered severe injuries and needed to go to the hospital, but no one has talked about it since.
So my question is, where’s the spin? Why aren’t people talking? This is a perfect opportunity for communicators, advocacy groups, and journalists to create GOOD spin and to speak up about domestic violence, yet no one’s talking.
Domestic violence affects so many people in our culture – in fact approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted annually in the United States, according to the American Bar Association. Now is the time for organizations to educate our country about the dangers of domestic violence and how prevalent, yet completely taboo, this issue is in our society, but no one stepped up to the plate.
A missed opportunity for good spin. How unfortunate.