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Media hype hides true charitable goal
By People's Daily, online edition |
March 30, 2012, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
OF China's 200 million or so lottery players, 80 percent say they buy lottery tickets just because they want to become rich overnight.
These figures were recently released by Beijing Normal University, which had just concluded a national online survey of the psychology and behavior of lottery players.
Why are so many players addicted to lotteries like desperate gamblers? Why do many of them even embezzle public money or earmark family subsistence money for gambling in lotteries that by their very nature promise little chance of success?
Media hype is largely to blame for the collective craze. Many media outlets lavish coverage on some lucky soul who claims he or she has won the top prize, often in the range of 100 million yuan (US$15.8 million) or more. The truer fact, however, is that for every one so-called winner, hundreds of millions of others are losers. But media seldom write stories about those losers, hence exaggerating the chance of winning the lottery.
Most lotteries are for the purpose of charity, but the purpose is often obscured and lost as skewed media reports mislead the public away from doing good.
These figures were recently released by Beijing Normal University, which had just concluded a national online survey of the psychology and behavior of lottery players.
Why are so many players addicted to lotteries like desperate gamblers? Why do many of them even embezzle public money or earmark family subsistence money for gambling in lotteries that by their very nature promise little chance of success?
Media hype is largely to blame for the collective craze. Many media outlets lavish coverage on some lucky soul who claims he or she has won the top prize, often in the range of 100 million yuan (US$15.8 million) or more. The truer fact, however, is that for every one so-called winner, hundreds of millions of others are losers. But media seldom write stories about those losers, hence exaggerating the chance of winning the lottery.
Most lotteries are for the purpose of charity, but the purpose is often obscured and lost as skewed media reports mislead the public away from doing good.
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