27 July 2018 Do You Trust The News?

Do You Trust The News?

I wrote on this before, however, it is becoming a crucial issue.  The 1^stamendment has freedom of the press as a founding tenant of the US Constitution.  However, it does not say it has to be accurate.  Now, would a rational person assume that to be the case, I would say yes. However, news sites are part of businesses, businesses that need to make a profit.  These businesses are run on advertising.  They want to get the max number of people to read or at least see the ads.  This creates challenges at times because some of the news that is critical may not be “exciting” enough to attract people.  The is as an old adage that “if it bleeds it leads.”  

I don’t believe any news organization is truly objective.  All the items are written by people.  People have biases.  That is not wrong just reality.  The words they choose can present a story in many different ways and still be factually accurate.  I believe that the major news organization do try to be accurate, but biases can still be brought into the presentation.  

I do think it is funny that news that is “reported” is “objective” while the “opinion or commentary pages” are “subjective.”  This is just the journalistic profession way of hiding their biases.  Journalists are no different than anybody else.  They are presented items about a story and they arrange them and create words to describe them.  Journalists may have a better grasp of the language and the nuance of wording, but that does not mean they understand a topic better.  They may be just better at packaging the story.   

It is very important that people view every news story they see/hear with a critical mind.  There are so many “news” sites online whose sole purpose is to distort and sway public opinion on an issue.  It has nothing to do with right or wrong or any sense of integrity in the “reporting.”  There are “fake news” sites out there, you just have to be sure you feel a sense of trust when reading anything.  Not everything you read is true or false.  Finding out which means looking at different sites to get different viewpoints.