'We Media' and Democracy- Matt Wells

‘We Media’ and Democracy

What I learned from the summer work

 

During the summer, it appeared to me that more news was coming my way than ever previously. Both through social media, and from big news companies etc. The first news story that caught my eye was broadcast on the national news when I was in America. The killing of Cecil the lion seemed to be the most popular, and controversial news stories broadcast over the two weeks that I spent there. I felt the story was quite reliable due to the swift nature of the story breaking in the country and that within a day there were several reporters on-location in Zimbabwe with eyewitness accounts of Walter Palmer’s (the man that killed him) arrival and intentions to hunt illegally. Regardless of this story eventually being broadcast across the world, I decided to check different platforms of social media to try and find a source of the story which brought my attention to Palmers twitter page, shared by many different people across social media, where he was showing off his ‘trophies’. This was evidence enough for me to fully trust the story thanks to social media.

There was quite a question mark over one of the other stories in America where a man was shot and killed in his car by a police officer. This story sparked much controversy, with the news channel I first heard the story on claiming it was standard procedure and the officer had been provoked. Shortly after footage of the incident was released the same news station began to contradict its own story lead in me to believe that the sources and facts were unreliable. This story does show an example of ‘Big Media’ simply telling the consumers what they want to hear rather than letting out a potentially damaging truth.

Another story which seemed to light up social media was the Syrian migrant crisis and Europe helping to accommodate for them. This was first brought to my attention through several of my friends discussing it on Facebook and sharing posts. The actual facts surrounding the story however seemed slightly distorted due to each individual's own opinion. His meant that I was incapable of trusting the sources as everyone seemed to give different facts. However, the many debates among my friends meant for interesting reading as throughout, the positives and negatives of this particular story were being discussed in detail allowing me to learn more about it through taking in different points of view and opinions.

Another way in which the migrant crisis story came to me was from browsing the internet where several advertisements flashed up on several different websites talking about it and informing viewers of the website about the facts. This was a new experience for me as I had never seen news like this delivered in such a way where news can get to me regardless of whether or not I am looking for it.

Another unavoidable part of news coverage was the football transfer window, most notably transfer deadline day where I was able to keep up with what was happening via the sky sports news website. With new stories and rumours appearing every minute, from various sources around the world. As a direct result of the number and variety of sources, it was very difficult to distinguish the reliable sources from the unreliable and a lot of the stories shown were proven to be false mere minutes after first being reported. However a way I found useful in distinguishing the truth from a simple rumour was the way the app often labels its sources and even sometimes explains whether or not they trust the reliability of the source giving their own, often trusted, opinion to its audience on what they should be believing and what they should simply dismiss as nothing more than a rumour.

Personally I rely quite heavily on social media to keep up to date with the news. While I do often watch it on TV and occasionally read the newspaper, I often prefer to attempt to test the reliability of the source through looking on several social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter etc. While I am aware that it is often a very unreliable way to find out about the news, I find that with enough digging through different posts, it is possible to get to the bottom of a particular story. However, I do tend to believe the news on TV without question until proven otherwise from another source.

This backs up the 'We Media' theory as almost every news story I saw had an element of social media within it with people discussing, sharing and contributing to each story, allowing the community to have a voice. However, it does show a downside to this as my habits show because a lot of news shared on social media can be very unreliable, and with hundreds, even thousands of different opinions of certain stories, it can be confusing to find the truth and confuse people as to what they should and shouldn’t believe.