James Key- We Media and Democracy

From my research over the summer and the news that I gathered I have learnt that I accessed the news through a variety of different sources.

I am very interested in my sport- so one on the places I got my news stories from was Sky Sports News HQ, on channel 401 (Sky). This channel is available to anyone with sky sports, and the one particular news story I focused on was the David De Gea transfer saga; the story seemed to be never ending! However, the story came to an abrupt conclusion on transfer deadline day where the papers for the transfer were not delivered on time, so after all the fuss he ended up staying at Manchester United. I found this source of news very intriguing and reliable because they gave you all the relevant updates as they happened and even had a banner at the bottom of the screen with the headlines in case you missed any important information. I think this source of news content is very good as it is always keeping viewers up to date and prioritises the more important things people want to hear about. The source, I believe, can be trusted as they send news reporters out round the country/world getting the information first hand and feeding it back to the viewers directly through a camera- we see it as the camera man filming the reporter at that time; so it hasn’t been manipulated by the company. There is no type of bias, as it is all formal information for the consumers to… consume.

Another place I got a piece of news from was MTV; this one speaks for itself. I saw the story about Kanye West running for president and however far-fetched it was I was still interested. The story came on as I was scrolling through the channels on my TV, not because I’m a keen MTV watcher, I promise… This source is not to be trusted as it gives the fans news that they will want to hear not the truth. I also believe the story itself is completely crazy, and it’s just a popularity stunt by Kanye to up his fame even more. However, to ensure the story was remotely true I checked online, and it was confirmed to be slightly true by the Daily Mail online- a highly trusted source in my opinion. This shows that news is different from different places and no matter how formal things may be, there still may be elements of false information within them.

I also gathered some news content from the BBC news show, shown at 10 o’clock every night and the BBC phone app. The BBC is the only news company in the world which is different to ‘Big Media’ (conglomerates such as Sky, Fox etc) and ‘New Media’ (social media sites etc) because it is funded by the tax payers. This means it is not owned by a ‘Media Baron’ (for example Rupert Murdoch) so it is therefore accountable to the public. A story I found on the BBC was the Syrian refugees fleeing the country and dying/not being accepted into countries. This story is a serious issue so is less likely to be manipulated by the producers; not that the BBC are known to manipulate stories but it is less likely with a serious story like this. The BBC offers a website online, news shows available to any TV owner at various points throughout the day and a phone app; this shows that the news is accessible to virtually anyone these days so it can spark conversation at any point. I can now talk to my dad about something he read in the newspaper and compare that to what I know from reading about the story on my BBC news app.

A final piece of evidence I recorded was from twitter, not greatly reliable or trusted, in fact not trusty or reliable at all. This is because it is a social media sight in which people express views and share stories from varies different websites from all over the internet. The news I got from it was how Dr. Dre was trying to sue the film ‘Straight Outta Compton’ for portraying him as a woman beater within the highly rated film. This information was so easy to access because I am always using twitter so I spotted whilst scrolling through my twitter page- it immediately grabbed my attention but even I’m not foolish enough to believe much I see on twitter!

The example of twitter as a place where I saw some news shows the how news works these days. The technological advances means that the former audience can now create/promote twisted stories and people will easily see it and maybe even believe it. The audience have, from the theory of Topscott and Williams, become prosumers; in which the past consumers have now become producers as well as consumers- which can make the news false or opinionated. However, citizen journalists can be created through the technological advances and if media companies miss some footage then a normal person that films the event can spread that through the internet- so everyone has greater access to more news and footage. An example of this would be the footage of 9/11 & the London riots in 2011 was filmed by a citizen journalist.

Another place in which I did not record any stories from but I actually read and is another form of news is The Sun, and highly intellectual, formal broadsheet type of newspaper… or it may well be a simple, celebrity crazed, very informal based tabloid aimed at the proletariat community. I think it may well be the latter of those two. The Sun has various different writers that give their news, so this cannot really be trusted as they may put their own opinion on the news, maybe twisting it to be more relatable/aimed at the lower class population, because the writers are probably of that class anyway.

I have learnt from the way I gather my news that it can be accessed so easily these days, and therefore how do we know what is true and what is not true? The answer is… we don’t. The people in ‘Big Media’, as stated by Owen Jones, are often privately educated and so therefore are not reflective of the society. The news is so wide spread through so many different platforms that pretty much anyone can give news or access news, with Dan Gilmour (the author of ‘We the media’) saying that technology is making news more democratic (people giving opinions through blogs, vlogs, YouTube etc). Whether this is a good thing, I’m not sure. I don’t think any single news story is fully true unless I know it for myself and have evidence.