The Importance of Journalism
As globalized people living in a technological age, the information that we are constantly exposed to can vary in verity and integrity, threatening to change the very premise of our worldview. As people begin to have easier access to news outlets, social media and other forums, it becomes more and more difficult to determine fact from fiction. Fake News has been a constantly increasing phenomenon, seeing widespread usage over the past year, especially during the American Election. Fake News is deliberately published propaganda, hoaxes and misinformation, under the guise of being real news. Fake News websites typically use social media to broaden their reach and further their influence. It is imperative for the sake of democracy, that the public views truthful and important news, not propaganda. Ever since the formation of the idea of modern journalism, the press has acted as a democratic check, governmental filter and an opinion challenger. For the threat to Democracy that is Fake News to be diminished, the Press must spread the truth as far as they can, while still maintaining integrity, diversity and verity. A free and unhindered press is one of the most important democratic devices; it forces government transparency as it informs, challenges and educates society.
As can be seen throughout history, especially recently, the press has played an important role in exposing those in power and finding the truth. In the early 1970’s, after five men were arrested breaking into the DNC offices in Washington D.C., the Washington Post began a feat of investigative journalism; they uncovered a trail of governmental corruption, wire tapping and extreme abuse of power which lead straight to the core of the White House. As a result of the Post’s Pulitzer Prize winning efforts, a president resigned and the face of a nation was changed forever. More recently, the press has still been uncovering corruption and abuse of power. Journalists from the Post and the Guardian along with the NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden, released a series of severely incriminating files, showing evidence of the US Government’s spying on both private citizens and foreign leaders. These revelations shook the world; diplomatic connections were strained. More importantly the public became aware of the corruption within the system and how its intellectual rights can be infringed upon.
Now the current threat to intellectual rights of individuals comes not in the form of a corrupt and secretive government organization, but instead in the form of Fake News. Fake News websites constantly produce sensationalist albeit slightly plausible stories and use social media to spread their misinformation in an attempt to push their agendas. As before mentioned, Fake News played a massive part in the American election; a Stanford and NYU research group found that 15% of Americans viewed social medias, mostly Facebook, as their most important source of election news. On Facebook’s platform exclusively, fake news pieces were shared 40 million times during the three-month period before the election, with an average of 7.5 people believing each shared piece. Evidently Fake News has a very strong grip upon how many people receive information and even more potential for malicious manipulation of the public. So how can it be stopped?
The press needs to take Fake News’ own methods and turn them against it; newspapers, networks and other forms of press need to use the wide reach of social media to access the public while maintaining journalistic integrity. Several news websites are making efforts to expand their reach, with Twitter and Facebook implementing news verifications, as well as Twitter supplying users with daily news recaps which are produced solely by verified news organizations. Fake News however still can be shared and influence the public. To counter this, BBC news and Snopes.com will be instating dedicated fact checking teams, who will trawl through news sources on Facebook, in an attempt to classify and tag Fake News outlets.
Above all, the most important components in the fight against Fake News are the ideas that a free press operates upon: diversity and integrity. Getting news from a range of truthful sources, be they The Age, FOX News or your local high school’s magazine, is the difference between being informed and being influenced.
Sources
http://mediashift.org/2016/12/fight-fake-news-misinformation-research-helps-point-way/
http://theconversation.com/fake-news-a-users-guide-73428
https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal