Henry Whittemore Library
Today's Hours:
To be sure, there ARE many sites out there that at first glance LOOK like today's legitimate news organization web sites (they are ALL lousy with ads, for example), but which are NOT much more than one wag's biased, partisan posting platform.
To learn how such fake news sites (as well as accounts on the other major social media platforms that pretend to be posting news) ply their trade, play this game. (It doesn't take that long, and it's QUITE eye opening.)
One really good, general rule-of-thumb: If it's really riled you up...look out!
Fake news sites cadging for followers, ad revenue, and attention aside, even today's 'legitimate' news organizations that have web presence, and make text and streaming video clips available to us, don't behave quite like those fabled, stolid, respectable news producers of yesteryear.
That really was the way it was.
OLDER RELATIVE: I swear! TV news used to be less sensationalist, more neutral! EVERYBODY trusted Walter Conkite!
Before you roll your eyes and say, "Sure, Grandpa, whatever you say..." They have a point.
News, regardless of which media form you chose (newspapers, radio or TV) used to be more 'balanced' - in the case of radio/TV was even required by Federal law to allow both sides of controversial issues to be heard. Exactly why and how this happened is beyond the scope of this page (Go take a Comm Arts class!), but basically, laws about radio broadcasting (later expanded to cover TV) that had been put in place earlier in the 20th century were challenged, then changed or struck down near the end of the century. News organizations could now essentially behave in a much more partisan manner without penalty.
And boy, did they.
Does this make you wonder if those laws had been out in place initially for a very good reason? As in, we'd have had the equivalent of Fox 'News' , and the radio 'Shock Jocks' much sooner if those laws hadn't existed? That said, very partisan Left-leaning broadcasts, like Pacifica Network's 'Democracy Now!', regularly heard on left-learning and indy college radio stations today, didn't exist until the late 1990s, either.
The gloves immediately came off, and pure partisanship SPRANG into being all over our Mediascape.
Do I need to add that the advent of cable networks in the 1980s, the arrival of the internet everyone could easily access in the 1990s, and... we'll add on the enforced transition to digital radio and TV broadcasting in the aughts, all combined to produce new news outlets in numbers never seen before, now competing with EVERYTHING available to catch viewers' attentions? This led somewhat inevitably to the formerly much more sober major news networks adopting similar attention-catching modus operandi as their new competitors.
Enter the phenomenon known as 'Infotainment'. Many of you reading this have known nothing else.
But this isn't even about being able to see more obvious bias in news organizations these days, or sensationalist ways of presenting what has been deemed 'newsworthy', including content that wasn't even considered worth covering in past decades. It's even more subtle than that.
While American Journalists have always acknowledged and usually (no one's perfect) adhered to North American standards and ideals of Journalism - relative impartiality, attempting to get multiple sides to a story, listening to but not necessarily taking at face value everything coming from people in high places - not all content created by journalists (whether they produce content for newspapers, radio, tv broadcast, or whatever) is simple, basic news reporting.
Journalists also write editorial content. And that is naturally opinionated and 'biased' in one direction or other. That bias is also openly acknowledged, too - they're not hiding this. And their job in doing that...is to attempt to influence YOU, the reader or viewer, by using words (or words, image and music, if video), in the hopes of getting you to consider their point of view. This isn't even a 'negative' thing per se - you may already agree with the premise of their article, for example.
But will you realize that if you're looking at something random you found on the internet, or even in one of our news databases? If you just quickly read it and go, "Mmm-hmm, okay, whatever..." and move on...did you catch it?
What makes a news article - a quick 'this happened' news clip, a longer story that comes out some weeks later when it's clearer what really happened and maybe even why...or a very partisan news editorial - 'good', anyway?
Accuracy is always good. Get real facts. Where do they need to go to get those? Other than the bare details of what happened (gotten from eye-witnesses, ideally), if a journalist needs additional 'facts' about a situation...to whom do they turn?
Well, they turn to 'experts' - that includes those people with lots of experience, which often means...to scholars, professionals, and researchers. Which is the reason why you'll hear a radio broadcaster briefly interview some college professor on a topic, as one example. In text, a journalist who is doing their job correctly will sometimes cite various experts, and ideally will include, if not actual citations, at least a link within their text leading to a relevant site that will tell the readers more.
So...information from the people who experienced an event is crucial...but so, often, is information from experts that can offer a possible explanation, or perhaps context, for news-worthy events. If there are no citations or not even any attempt to link to information from true experts...what exactly are you reading, and what is its purpose?
Last, but not least...is fact-checking, a basic necessity of good journalism. In a news organization, reporters will bring in news, write it up. After that, editorial staff are supposed to check it for excessive bias where it needs to be toned down before release, and also ensure that it gets fact-checked. So, when incorrect news is released... that entire vetting system has really failed.
"In November 2012, the Leveson report – published in the UK by Lord Justice Leveson – incorrectly listed a "Brett Straub" as one of the founders of The Independent newspaper. The name originated from one of the several erroneous edits by one of Straub's friends as a prank to Wikipedia by falsely including his name in several articles across the site. The name's inclusion in the report suggested that part of the report relating to that newspaper had been cut and pasted from Wikipedia without a proper check of the sources.[51][52] The Straub issue was also humorously referenced in broadcasts of BBC entertainment current affairs TV program Have I Got News for You (and extended edition Have I Got a Bit More News for You),[53][54] with The Economist also making passing comment on the issue: "The Leveson report ... Parts of it are a scissors-and-paste job culled from Wikipedia."[55]"
Excerpt above is from: Vandalism on Wikipedia licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0.
With this last cautionary tale, we've come full-circle back around to "is it real or not?", highlighting how crucial it is for today's journalists and editors to do their jobs correctly.