By Grant Terwilliger
In the United States, adults on average consume around one hour per day of news media and there are thousands of publications in the country. Finding out what news sources are truthful and unbiased is difficult.
Being a journalism student, I often think about the modern day biases and unreliability of larger news networks in regard to politics and sensationalism. I question how competing newsrooms let politics, exaggeration of news stories and bias into their content.
Is the idea of unreliable journalism a 21st century issue or a 19th century issue? I think back to the competition between Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal.
In the 19th century, they negatively revolutionized journalism with their use of inaccurate and exaggerated stories that were meant to draw attention rather than publish stories that tell the truth.
Corporate newsrooms have shifted far from the general ethics of journalism and as technology has advanced, bigger newsrooms were able to keep up with the changes to the industry, but local papers fell behind and lacked finances to continue.
The journalism law of ethics is to seek truth and report it as fully as possible, act independently, minimize harm and be accountable.
“The demographics are getting smaller over time, because young people aren’t as connected to whatever their local news networks are as opposed to whatever they see on Instagram or whatever else,” sophomore political science major Nate Alexander said.
In my opinion, local newspapers are more reliable and ethical, usually reporting on the most important things in the area that directly affect the reader and focus on enriching the community’s knowledge. That doesn’t necessarily mean that smaller publications are necessarily free from bias though.
The law of ethics can be broken by any journalist or publication, so it is important to realize that although local journalism has a better chance of being reliable and trustworthy it is not always the case.
Larger news networks may have truth behind their stories too, but you should always compare different publications regarding a story.
“I think big news networks are trustworthy, you just have to take it with a grain of salt and see if other news networks cover the story in the same way to eliminate bias from the story,” said sophomore journalism major Christian Tufino.
The fairness doctrine — a law introduced in 1949 by the Federal Communications Commission — also plays a big role in this affair. This law required holders of broadcast licenses to present both sides of a controversial story.
The fairness doctrine allowed for journalism to become more equal and unbiased, but some people claimed that it erased freedom of speech.
In 1987 the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine which allowed biased news to spread like wildfire among news networks wanting to express their own opinions.
“I think I’d say Fox News is definitely the most unreliable because I know the big ones are CNN, NBC and then Fox News,” Alexander said. “They’re all biased to some extent, because all news media is, ultimately, but I know Fox News has a lot.”
As we move more and more toward a technological and misinformed future, it is important to try to seek out the reliable news sources and read multiple different news sources to stay correctly informed on the world around us.
