Elizabeth John Introduction

When the death of an important individual occurs the media plays a significant role in how the death of this individual is reported to its viewers. The media portrays these stories with key missing information, and stories with something interesting about the story itself with a certain emphasis on the story because of its uniqueness or lack of details. Two examples of reports that are incomplete and unique is the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the unfortunate drug overdose of Heath Ledger both of these stories contain skeptical details on the cause of their deaths. By comparing CNN.com and FowNews.com this paper will examine the reporting of these two tradgic stories. There is a certain phenomena that occurs when media reports are released about the death of an important individual, the story evolves around the events of what happened in the person's last minutes alive, and how the person passed, these are key questions that need to be answered by the media because as a viewer when a death occurs these questions are of interest, and the media is a basic source to recieve this information from, and when the media cannot produce the details they become obsessed with the missing information since they are not reporting the whole story to the public.