Joe Patton - 'We Media' and Democracy

‘We Media’ and Democracy

 

While I was completing the summer work it became evident if it wasn’t already that the majority of news and stories travel through word of mouth and social media a lot more than they do from people seeking out news on their own. The news which is constantly being thrown around on social media can be quite deceiving as people often edit the information and change parts of it so it is never easy to filter out the lies and unreliable news stories. However certain amounts of the news on bigger sites can often be believed to be more trustworthy because it is coming from ‘big media’ sites such as newspapers and other large sources. The majority of the news stories that I read and take an interest in come from BBC news and the BBC’s website. This is because I believe the BBC to be a trusted source because its funds are paid for by the taxpayer rather than privately owned big news firms.

The first piece of news that I saw and took note of over the summer was when I saw on the BBC news website that there were jobs at risk for Morrison’s employees. There are 900 jobs at risk as a certain eleven stores are set to close in the UK. In early September the firm announced that it was selling 140 loss-making Morrison’s local stores for a sum of around 25 million. I became interested in this piece of news when I was browsing through the BBC news website and decided to read it in case the store where I work was at risk. I believe this piece of information is from a trusted source because the BBC is a well-known website and isn’t run by any single corporation or person who might select certain pieces of information to give to the general public for their own gain. I was also made aware of this news by one of my Facebook friends sharing it on their newsfeed but this story was on another separate website to the original one I saw it on, making it even more believable because I had seen the same news story with the same facts and statistics on multiple websites. Once I knew that this was a real news story and I could trust it I told my friend who already knew because he’d also seen it.

The second news story I saw and thought was worth reading about was the crisis in Syria and all the thousands of refugees that had to leave their homes and their country in an attempt to escape to a better life in a country not affected by war. This was a huge news story over the summer because everyone is concerned about other people in some way and the majority of people get upset about human suffering and discomfort so it makes for big news which many people take an interest in, resulting in it getting shared and carried around in many different ways. The many different news stories about Syria and the refugees was spread and posted by multiple different sources, some of which I would view as reliable and some which are far from reliable.

 Most of the news I read about this crisis was shared throughout Facebook and Twitter. These social media sites are the main places to gather different pieces of information in today’s society. This is good in some ways as it allows stories and news to spread quickly and to a much wider audience as there are a lot more people that use these kinds of websites each day than there are that seek out news on the official ‘big media’ news websites and newspapers. I don’t believe social media to always be reliable as stories can change between people the more they get spread around, this creates confusion between fiction and reality which is often the biggest problem with social network sites. However there are pages on social media specifically for news corporations to share news which is in their papers and websites. These are reliable sources as they are proper news firms and on these pages is where much of the information about the refugees came from which I saw people sharing round social media. However some of the information on this current affair might be bias because of the interests of the ‘big media’ companies and leaders. It is in their best interests for these refugees not to enter our country so their stories are reports about the affair might be bias. This is why the BBC is such a good reliable source of news and information because it is not owned by one company or a specific person so the information has less chance of their news being bias.

Another piece of news I took an interest in over the summer was when Kanye West announced that he intends to run for president in 2020. This was a strange piece of news because it was so unexpected. This piece of news was announced live on MTV when he was doing a speech after winning an award that’s how I know that the information is reliable because it was live and could not be edited or changed this is how it was from a trusted source. Obviously as soon as this happened people were spreading it through social media such as Twitter and Facebook because he is such a well-known celebrity a lot of people were responding to it in a numerous ways of hate and shock and excitement. This story was published in the papers the following day with each different paper responding to the story in different ways depending how the people involved with the paper felt about it.

Probably the most talked about news story over the summer was the Labour party leadership running and voting. The run up to the vote and the actual vote itself was constant news in the UK as it was such an important event for British politics. Jeremy Corbyn was in the spotlight constantly for the media who took a great interest in the story because it was so important to the people running the media as well as the general public. It is very difficult to know which information about Corbyn can be trusted and which can’t because there are so many different minds at work pumping out all sorts of stories to use as propaganda against the Labour party and its leader. The right wing papers and news organisations presenting him as some sort of mad man who is friends with terrorists and the more left wing papers suggesting that he is the man that our country needs in the future to rescue us from David Cameron and his Conservative party. News about this was very easy to find all over the internet with people I follow on Twitter and Facebook taking a keen interest in these events. The best source of information for being honest about the voting was probably the BBC again because it is a lot less bias than the majority of all other news organisations.