This article may need to be rewritten to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards. You can help. The talk page may contain suggestions.(February 2018)
A media feeding frenzy is intense media coverage of a story of great interest to the public.
The 1998 Clinton–Lewinsky scandal in the U.S. was a well-noted example of this.
The metaphor, drawing an analogy with feeding frenzies of groups of animals, was popularized by Larry Sabato's book Feeding Frenzy: Attack Journalism and American Politics.
Other examples include media coverage of "crime waves" that often drive changes in criminal law to address problems that do not appear in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the most reliable indicator of actual crime in the U.S.; unlike the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the NCVS is not affected by changes in people's willingness to report crimes to law enforcement and in the willingness of law enforcement to forward UCRs to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for inclusion in national summaries.[1]
Sacco claimed that media outlets try to organize their reporting as much as possible around themes to help them amortize over several reports the work required to educate a journalist to the point where they can discuss a subject intelligently. These themes become "feeding frenzies".[2] The availability cascade helps explain the human psychology behind a media feeding frenzy.
A commercial media organization could lose advertising if they had a media feeding frenzy that affected an advertiser's business: Advertisers don't want to feed the mouths that bite them, and have been known to modify where they spend their advertising budget accordingly. Commercial media disseminate negative information about advertisers only to the extent required to keep customers.[3]
^Sacco, Vincent F. (2005), When Crime Waves, Sage, ISBN 9780761927839
^Sacco, Vincent F. (1995). "Media constructions of crime". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 539 (1): 141–154. doi:10.1177/0002716295539001011. cited from Potter and Kapeller (1998, pp. 37-51; see especially the section on "The Content of Crime Problems", p. 42
^McChesney, Robert W. (2004). The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century. Monthly Review Press. ISBN 1-58367-105-6.
and 20 Related for: Media feeding frenzy information
themes become "feedingfrenzies". The availability cascade helps explain the human psychology behind a mediafeedingfrenzy. A commercial media organization...
In ecology, a feedingfrenzy is a type of animal group activity that occurs when predators are overwhelmed by the amount of prey available. The term is...
called a mediafeedingfrenzy or just mediafrenzy, especially when the media coverage itself is covered. Although the idea is older, the term media circus...
or killed because of Halloween candy sabotage. The phenomenon of mediafeedingfrenzies is driven by a combination of the psychology described by the availability...
the phenomenon was not a real craze, describing the coverage as a mediafeedingfrenzy and part of "a long history of trend pieces that come out of nowhere"...
commercial media organization by reducing their purchases of advertising space with that organization. News media thrive on feedingfrenzies (such as missing...
thirteen, he was first tattooed on a trip to Thailand to escape the mediafeedingfrenzy his parents' marriage was receiving; he later acquired a large selection...
that he did not mind if people uttered the word "fuck" led to a mediafeedingfrenzy and critics lamenting the erosion of boundary between politicians...
the final driveline, but the public damage was done and a negative mediafeedingfrenzy resulted. Tucker responded by publishing a full-page advertisement...
other Red Letter Media members have been largely comedies like Oranges: Revenge of the Eggplant, or horror films such as FeedingFrenzy, The Recovered and...
interacts with the management policies of media outlets to create availability cascades and mediafeedingfrenzies: For example, "strokes cause almost twice...
are unavoidable and that in the wake of a scandal a political and mediafeedingfrenzy will not abate until someone is ‘named, blamed and shamed’ creates...
Report: Clinton Accused / Jimmy Carter's 'Killer Rabbit' – 1979". FeedingFrenzy: MediaFrenzies In Our Time. The Washington Post. Archived from the original...
presidency (Greenwood, 2002) online Maurer, Paul J. (March 1999). "MediaFeedingFrenzies: Press Behavior During Two Clinton Scandals". Presidential Studies...
2017 (2017-07-03) 0.80 The news of Nina and Shawn's affair causes a mediafeedingfrenzy, prompting Maxine to hire a crisis manager to do damage control....
movement and called her loss collateral damage of a "feedingfrenzy", blaming Weinstein, McGowan, the media, and the public for her death. Messick was the daughter...
Guardian. London. Retrieved 2008-02-14. "Susan's book sets off a mediafeeding-frenzy". Helsingin Sanomat. Archived from the original on 2009-02-25. Retrieved...
of feeding chicken litter to cattle could lead to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad-cow disease) because of the crushed bone meal in chicken feed. The...
member. Sabato is the author of over twenty books on politics, including FeedingFrenzy: Attack Journalism and American Politics and The Rise of Political Consultants:...
Global Information