In my opinion the quality of news and information broadcasted to the public has become better in quality when they are from reliable sources. When looking for information, one is more likely to take a trusted a social media source, such as, CNN, CBC, CP24, as opposed to an unreliable source, like Wikipedia, the material is bound to be poor quality. The first aspect that supports my theory is video sharing applications. Since the addition of video sharing applications on social media, the public is not only getting to hear about the news they are actually getting to see it firsthand. With online social media sites the public gets to witness almost instantly what is going on in a story rather than just hearing a news story on it. An example of this is ABC News that has YouTube application where citizens can upload their videos to ABC that has a live video of the breaking news that has occurred. Secondly, the introduction of blogs to the internet for people to read and write their response back to the posted blog has increased quality. Blogs are said to be the next form of journalism and have exploded onto the social media scene. Blogs that are trustworthy material are usually written by reporters for media companies that allow citizens to comment and add their thoughts on the news being reported. Blogs can also cover stories that giant media companies like Global News, can look over and miss. GlobalVoices is a non profit blog service that collects interesting stories from around the world that are not reported by big media companies and sorts out what’s worth passing on to readers. This gives the public a chance to read stories they normally wouldn’t hear about which is a quality change in the variety of news stories. Lastly, is the invention of Smartphone’s and the social media tools that can be used to report instant news. Before the public would have to wait for the news, whereas now the citizens are usually first on the scene of the developing story. Camera phone on occasion are the only devices that catch a picture of breaking news or creates the news which is a huge advancement in quality of new information. Therefore based on those facts I believe that if the sources are valid the quality of the news and information shared with the public has greatly improved.
On one hand I agree with you, but on another I think there is a completely different side to this. I understand when you say that there is better quality when it comes to trusted sources such as CP24,ABC,etc., however I think there are many social media sources out there that can overpower some people's views on things. A YouTube video might be viewed and someone might believe what is being shown is actually true, meanwhile it was an edited video. Facebook status', Tweets and any other forms of information passed along by everyday citizens can not only not be trusted, but is generally passed along at rapid rate, and before you know it stories are being changed and things are being added. I think there are many more ways the media has decreased the quality, than increased.
ReplyDeleteI would have to disagree with you here. You're only looking at the surface of the web, and seeing only the popular sites that actually do publish good quality content. If you actually look deeper you'll notice how many amateur news sites there really are. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions. It is definitely a "quantity over quality" situation.
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