Who Can You Trust?

Brianna Smith 

 

bs214517@ohio.edu 

 

 

In the last few years, social media has become one of the main channels for news and information. However, it happened too quickly for even journalists to keep up and it caused a shaky ground for the future of news. Several things make it too difficult for viewers to get reliable news from anywhere.

Fight For Views

Firstly, journalists are forced to fight for views on all platforms. In order to get views, writers need to be constantly pumping out the most recent breaking news at all times. This is a lot of pressure for any young writer to handle. Because of this, most news outlets are serving their viewers quantity over quality .

Instead of having the time to fully research a situation and come out with a factual, well-rounded story . . . journalists are forced to write something quickly with minimal detail. This means that most news stories feel very unfinished because they are.

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Biased Algorithms 

Secondly, social media platforms are designed with bias algorithms. As a writer myself, I understand how quickly bias can creep into my own writing after knowing all the details. However, people are forming opinions on things without knowing the full story because their algorithm is only feeding them what they want to hear.

For example, I am a very liberal person and all of the news I get off Twitter is always from a liberal standpoint. Of course it's nice to only read about things I will agree with, but it's dangerous to not be able to view the news as a whole. 

This is why I use Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat as starting points. If a story were to peak my interest, I would then conduct my own research on the topic so I could form an unbiased opinion.

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Fake News

Thirdly, garbage stories with click-bait titles spread so unnervingly fast in 2020. News spreads quickly through social media and consequently, so does fake news. Obviously this is very concerning because anyone can get a website and write some lies with a fantastic title. 

All the writer has to do is upload the post onto twitter and it could potentially spread like wildfire and to make matters worse, people will believe the information as factual!

In an article titled, "Investigating the Influence of 'Clickbait' News Headlines", the author says, "Past research has found that headlines can change perceptions of a criminal suspect's supposed guilt, influence how individuals assess political candidates, and affect comprehension and memory of news articles."

I chose that quote because I think it highlights the importance of writing real factual based stories as a journalist and researching any information given to you as a viewer.

So who can you trust to be a reliable news source? 

The best answer I can give is yourself!

Regardless of the information, always research the topic further by yourself before forming an opinion.