‘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.
This is very good , gives good perspective and has a variety of views, whilst maintaining an unbiased view. big respect
ReplyDeleteDue to a lot of your sources being from social media and word of mouth, this strongly affects the reliability of what you have heard since when other people are discussing it they are likely to express it in their view of it when they are telling you about it.
ReplyDelete