'We Media' and Democracy - Josie Quigley-Jay

From reading the booklet over the summer I have been reflecting more on media and furthermore, my usage of it. When it comes to news I‘m not one for actively seeking it out, I’ll hear the main news headlines but I don’t often read much into it and a lot of this is due to social media.

Social media plays a massive part in everyday life, particularly for newer generations, it’s a huge knowledge source on which people can share what they’ve seen and their opinions. However a big down side of social media news is that it’s not very trustworthy. Because social media is a platform that gives a voice to anyone a lot of the news can become diluted. People may slightly change or twist facts to suit their views or misread something and as this is then being shared to others, stories can become something completely different. Another factor of news and social media is that a lot of ‘news’ can be untrue and is simply there to get people’s attention. For example recently my sister came home with a news story a friend had told her which they’d seen on Facebook. They told her Jaden Smith was dead. I then looked into this as I didn’t believe it and found it was false. The story line had been used to simply stir trouble and on some occasions, once the story was clicked on, led to completely irrelevant pages such as surveys. Due to this I don’t often believe headlines I read on social media and tend to ignore them unless I have an interest on the topic, then I will research it to check the credibility. However a lot of people don’t do this which leads to a lot of false information being spread around such as Jaden Smiths death. No one or thing can really be blamed for this and I just think it’s down to the type of person you are in terms of whether you decided to believe whatever you read or research further. As I said I’m one that would rather check credibility however false information shouldn’t be spread in the first place but a lot of the time it is simply accidental and just a misunderstanding. A Youtuber Jack Howard was a ‘victim’ of this as a producer using a video of Jack within a talk became Jack inspiring The Hunger Games. Not true this is simply how the media twisted it.  (He talks about it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4zb2jxh3PU). For a more recent comparison another Youtuber Marina Joyce was under spot light over the summer holidays as media believed she was, somewhere on the lines of, kidnapped. No one particularly knows where this story began but everyone certainly ran with it with evidence ranging from her apparent bruises to essences of whispers saying ‘help me’ in the background of the video. I saw this news on social media and after reading the title (something announcing her as kidnapped) I chose to read further finding it was untrue. However it didn’t stop there, as the story kept growing, friends asked me about it and other Youtubers started uploading videos giving their views. It finally ended, ish, with a video by another Youtuber, Luke Cutforth, completely disproving the story and even calling Marina to allow her to reassure fans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdLsQPdok5s).

In comparison to social media being untrustworthy I tend to see the BBC as trustworthy. This seems to be a common belief across other peers too which I found from our class research. This tends to be due to the fact that the BBC, unlike many other news sources, is funded by taxpayer’s money and because of this is meant to appear unbiased. The BBC is expected to simply provide facts and allow viewers to interpret this and form opinions on their own. An example of this is that the day of the vote for ‘Brexit’ the BBC did not report anything on it in order to stay unbiased. This is very different to news sources such as Sky and The Sun which are both owned by Rupert Murdoch. Because these are owned by a single person they are allowed to be biased and show the news through their opinions.  For example this (http://news.sky.com/story/hillary-clinton-links-donald-trump-with-alt-right-movement-10551709) news articles headline reads ‘Hillary Clinton Attacks Trump's Appearance With Nigel Farage’ the use of ‘attacks’ represents Hillary as vicious while if unbiased Sky news could simply have said ‘comments.’

Despite saying this about Sky News, believing it to be less trustworthy, my family tend to watch it more than any other. Every time we have dinner my dad puts on Sky News (ignoring the protests of the majority). I asked him about this and his reply was ‘Don’t get me wrong I prefer the BBC however Sky News we get for free and is just easier.’ As we’re Sky customers we get Sky Go which we use on dad’s computer. He explained that as we’re using Sky Go it’s more accessible to watch Sky News as it doesn’t require signing in or extra payments etc. This shows that despite people’s preferences, their news in take is largely down to accessibility at the time. This links back to social media news as this is what many find easy to access whether on a train or sat at home its quicker and more regularly checked compared to TV news. This is especially relevant when it comes to things such as set news times. The news on social media is constantly updated and will know very quickly about an event while news on the platform of TV will not be shared until its scheduled slot.

Although different news companies have attempted to bridge this gap by producing things such as news apps. We were asked to download this app for a week and use the ‘My News’ feature which allows you to adapt your news feed to your interests.  I used this feature, at first curious as to what interesting stories I’d find however throughout the week was a bit disappointed as I wasn’t really attracted to any. This could be because none of them were particularly big headlines and a lot of what I’d selected as my interests were only relevant depending on what I felt like reading. For example I selected the Paralympics as I had been watching ‘The Last Leg’ report on it a few days before hand but when I was getting news titles such as ‘____ wins 7^th gold for Britain’ I didn’t know who the Olympian was and so just scrolled past with disinterest. I found that because of this I didn’t check the app very often or end up reading into any news articles on the news apps and simply stuck to the Sky News at dinner as this only showed relevant big topics.  

From this I’ve learnt News plays a huge part in our lives and its consumption can be very subjective and personal to each individual. I’ve also learnt that news consumption is constantly changing and growing from newspaper to apps and what may be popular now could be completely redundant in ten years’ time.