When I was in 7th grade, we learned about "yellow journalism," a phenomenon named in the 1900's in which newspaper owners held a war of words using their media properties in order to boost sales.
Our classroom exercise was to take a physical/printed newspaper and highlight in yellow all of the adjectives or non-factual sections of the articles. We ended up with some yellow, but mostly the newspaper of 1970-something (I'm not saying the exact year, people) passed the sniff test.
Fast forward to today, when every single web page and social network has a "news feed." One of the final holdouts, Google's search page, just caved in.
The thought I'm pondering this morning is whether we really need all of this "news." And I put it in quotes because a vast percentage of what appears in the "news feeds" isn't technically news. It wasn't written by trained journalists, it wasn't vetted or fact-checked by a team of professionals. Sometimes it's paid "native" content, sometimes it's "fake news," and sometimes it's just an interesting headline that's gained popularity by being shared a lot.
I wonder if it's too late to remind the general public that journalism is a thing that exists. There are people out there whose job it is to write the story of what actually happened on a given day. They are trained to answer the Who, What, Why, Where, When of the situation, presumably without slanted embellishments or opinions. (They're still out there, like the last unicorns.)
One reason the water has been muddied is because of the huge aggregator news sites that have large networks of "contributors" who are not journalists. They're simply writers who do work for hire. I won't name names, but Shmorbes and Shmuffington Shmost have had to clamp down on their networks to try to gain some sense of integrity (a work in progress). And yet the readers have no idea that the articles they're reading aren't news.
You might be rolling your eyes right now, saying, "reader beware," or "we all know there are PR folks out there generating stories." But there's a difference between getting information/facts from a PR person as a component of a story, and copy/pasting a press release wholesale. Or worse, scraping a false headline from another site and running with it.
I don't have an answer to the problem, but I do know that adding more "news feeds" to the screen is not it.
You have a point. I was horrified knowing there is a market to write a fake news. I took journalism class about a year ago at a university level and I was not taught to do fact-checking or journalism principles. I was only taught how to write and a very basic introduction to it. I'd say, I learned more about journalism in my high school rather than in the university.
I second the term last unicorns. Especially for those, who still hold dearly journalism principles.
So glad to hear I'm not alone out here!
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Hey, @rosemaryoneill:
I'm glad you brought up that yellow journalism and its variants have been going on for quite a long time, and tends to have its cycles just as most everything else does.
That said, in this day and age of instant everything, which includes the 'news,' and endless speculation and review of the events, well before there are even any facts to present, yellow news has ascended, or descended, to a whole other level. Or, at least, more of us are exposed to it nearly as quickly as it happens.
The said thing is, as you say, many people have become so used to it, that they don't know it's not truly journalism, but agenda driven propaganda with some marketing for ratings thrown into the mix.
It's absolutely true—Most news outlets are nothing more than PR firms for certain societal or political philosophies. They all seem to share the same headlines, press releases, AP news, etc., without caring about fact checking if it fits the narrative.
Never in my lifetime has a presidential election been won in good measure because the candidate ran against the media! How amazing is that? It may very well happen again.
The answer to the problem is going to be complicated, since the media is almost indistinguishable from the political parties, and those shaping society. It would all have to be dismantled and discredited, and for that to happen, I'm afraid a lot more pain and anguish is coming.
Absolutely right, and I'm concerned that younger generation users of social platforms see the "News" heading and assume that everything under that heading is fact. Hopefully we're raising critical thinkers.
Well, I've tried in my case. I'd like to think that others have too, but I'm afraid too many parents have abdicated many of those types of responsibilities to the schools. The ones who are aware of what is going certainly try to instill some level of critical thinking in their children, but those parents who basically think it's the school's job to educate, well, I'm afraid there's lots of them. In other words, the parents aren't great at critical thinking themselves.
The problem is, critical thinking might not get you where you want to go, either. Knowing what's true doesn't mean that everything is going to fall in line. It generally makes you an outsider, especially when it comes to elections or party affiliations or anything political. Too many are voting against something else, or voting with their emotions. Critical thinking is largely thrown out the window.
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