hm491514@ohio.edu
With the news more easily accessible then ever before, you would think as a society we would be more well-informed than ever before. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
 |
| from Mediaite |
Currently, with the lack of transparency and the amount of fake news circulating, confidence in the accuracy of news has dropped to low levels. According to Gallup, only 16% of Americans have trust in news on the internet, which is less than that of print (27%) and television (24%).
What's causing this lack of trust? It could have to do with the amounts of recalled information, the articles that are edited after publication or the sites themselves.
BuzzFeed is a hugely popular company that uses many different outlets to share their media. When you think of BuzzFeed there's a good chance you think of YouTube videos, quizzes or humorous listicles. But what about news? BuzzFeed, along with other online news outlets, are working on upping their reliability game.
News is constantly being published online, and the quick turnaround can make it hard to catch every mistake. Not to mention, each news source wants to be the one to break the story. This leads to inaccurate information that is passed around faster than was once even imagined.
Marc Fisher explained this new era in journalism by saying "digital journalists countered that their way was more honest and democratic-- and quicker. If that meant presenting stories before they'd been thoroughly vetted, that was okay, because the internet would correct itself. Truth would emerge through open trial and error".
Is this an okay concept? Is it ethically and morally okay to publish information to the general public before knowing if the, possibly controversial, news is even accurate?
An article written for The New York Times by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld was under lots of fire in 2015 for having misleading and terribly biased information. The article was named, "Inside Amazon: Wresting Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace" and focused on the almost cruel work conditions that employers of Amazon faced on a daily basis.
This was immediately rebutted by a current employee of the company, Nick Ciubotariu, who wrote his own article disproving the original article published in The Times. He started the response with his 5 simple steps on how to write a false story. They are as follows:
"Step 1: Have bias
Step 2: Find ex-employees with anecdotal stories that fit in with your bias
Step 3: Gather old stories and criticism while glossing over changes made to improve on that, and completely ignore that it's still significantly better than industry practice
Step 4: Take half-truths and spin spin spin!!
Step 5: Publish article"
Although there may never be a time when everything we see online is 100% accurate, we can hope that journalists will stick closer to ethical guidelines and work to build trust in news that is published on the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment