Susan Athey, who is the Economics of technology Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, gave a lecture on “The impact of the Internet on the News Media”. She touched on many issues in her lecture about his issue. News Media being on the internet is fairly newer and a hot topic. Two of the problems in Social media news is the high levels of inaccuracy and competing rather than coverage. With social media being one the quickest ways to get the coverage out to people, these two problems go hand in hand with the situation. It is a very serious problem that needs to be fixed to make sure the News is getting it right.
“A full 85% of the Comcast-owned network’s coverage can be classified as opinion or commentary rather than straight news”, according to the authors of the Pew Research Center’s annual State of the News Media report. News media’s top priority should be getting the information to the public correctly. Sometimes with News Media being on social media, they put out the wrong information on the web. This could have a HUGE impact on people if it is wrong in anyway. According to an in-depth study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1999,” 23 percent of the public find factual errors in the news stories of their daily paper at least once a week while more than a third of the public – 35 percent – see spelling or grammar mistakes in their newspaper more than once a week. The study also found that 73 percent of adults in America have become more skeptical about the accuracy of their news.” I find this to be a huge problem with the media today. Another example was from one of our class presentations. I remembering the presentation talking about a boy whose name got released of the person who was shooter when it wasn’t him, it was his brother. He tweeted out saying that he hated the news and how could they get this mixed up. That potentially could have ruined that kid’s life all from one small mistake of the right name.
The second issue is that the News stations are always trying to get the message our first and they are competing with each other which is causing there to be mistakes. Instead of actually trying to cover the story and making sure they have the information correct, a lot of news companies today are getting the story wrong and not covering it full time like they did back in the day. Social media has really changed the speed of things and a story can be covered in just minutes after it happens due to technology. Reporters and journalists are just hearing what happened and putting it on social media without even having a creditable first hand source of what is happening or going on. According to a 2014 study done on social media on news, is states that “Journalists act differently on social media compared to the way they report through traditional news channels. 67% of journalists said they express themselves differently on social media, sharing their personal opinion more openly on social media, despite the fact that journalists are seen as being objective and reporters of news facts relating to events of general importance.” This cannot happen to our social media news. It should be about covering the news not about personally opinions. A mistake can also be looked as a lie in some cases.
In Conclusion, there are many benefits to having social media news but there are some serious disadvantages and problems that can occur as well. It’s really important to discuss these issues of releasing the correct news and not rushing to get it out first because these mistakes could be crucial not only to your company but to the people you are reporting about. It could possible change someone’s life.
References
Bercovici, J. (2013, March 18). Pew Study Finds MSNBC the Most Opinionated Cable News Channel By Far. Retrieved March 30, 2017, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/03/18/pew-study-finds-msnbc-the-most-opinionated-cable-news-channel-by-far/#804a2b45f8c4
Current Problems in the Media. (n.d.). Retrieved March 30, 2017, from https://www.dailysource.org/about/problems
I. (2014, June 19). 2014 Study impact of Social Media on News: more crowd-checking, less fact-checking. Retrieved March 30, 2017, from https://www.ing.com/Newsroom/All-news/NW/2014-Study-impact-of-Social-Media-on-News-more-crowdchecking-less-factchecking.htm