Every day, we are bombarded with information. We hear it from friends, family, celebrities, the news, and from overhearing the conversations of strangers. Like most other things, depending on who’s doing the sharing, our information can be infected with bias. Hearing all sides to a story is often overwhelming and can make the truth murky like stagnant water. When we don’t know all the information or are unclear on what the truth really is, we have to rely on our own judgement to find who is being honest and who has a hidden motive. Journalists have been notoriously blamed for the misinformation that circulates our media. After doing research, it is still unclear why the blame has been shoved onto those who merely use their senses to report events, but the phenomena are still astounding.
According to Harvey Morris at The New York Times in his article “How Much Do You Trust Journalists?”, a poll taken in London surveying 1,018 people showed that only one in five admit to trusting journalists, which is just about the same number as people who admitted to trusting bankers. Oddly enough, seventy percent of that sample say that they trust television news casters. How can this be? What difference does it make whether the story is written in a newspaper or read from a teleprompter in front of a green screen? What this study found still leaves these questions unanswered. Maria Young, a writer for the University of Mary Washington’s school paper The Bullet, states that with social media being so relevant in most people’s lives, it’s more difficult for journalists to break a story. When the same information being tweeted live from bystanders with no ulterior motive is reported by a paid writer, sometimes the obvious choice when looking for the truth is the former.
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On top of all this, I have made an observation of my own. Nowadays, it seems like tragedies are more frequent than they were fifty years ago. This is not the case even though it may seem so. Like stated above by Ms. Young, Twitter and Facebook are extremely popular all over the world and this causes events to be broadcasted while they are happening rather than being reported after the fact by a professional. For example, when the BANG of George Zimmerman’s gun was heard seconds before the tragic death of Treyvon Martin, it was being talked about. It takes longer for a camera crew and a news cater or a journalist to appear on the scene and find an angle than it does for people to tweet a picture or create a hashtag memorializing this event that will go down in history.
For many, it feels easier to trust someone who is an “average Joe” to give us the straight, unfiltered facts than a paid professional who is well-versed in writing and twisting words. What we have to remember is that everyone has a motive or an angle. Anyone can word something in their favor or against someone else’s. Journalist’s are people too, and are just as likely to spin a situation or report it as it happened as the average person.
