FAKE NEWS: DOES THE TRUTH MATTER?

NEWS- FACT OR FICTION

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           “The conviction that there is such a thing as objective truth that can be discovered and delivered through dispassionate hard work and passionate good faith, and that the product of that effort, if thoroughly documented, would be accepted as the truth” (Shribman). In a nation where fake news is on the rise, many people find articles and news headlines hard to believe. When it comes down to the end, a majority of the population will argue if weather the news being shared is true or false. The question many people are asking, does the truth really matter? The people of a country should be given the truth through the news because it ends misleading “facts,” terminates biased opinion, and abolishes the overall uncertainty felt by the consumer.

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                   In the United States alone, in every ten people, seven people use social media (“Social Media Fact Sheet”). News shared by popular news outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post (Langlois) are easily accessible on every social media outlet like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr and can be easily skewed by the viewer reading the article. This fake news can either come from teenagers purposefully producing them up to business men in the United States trying to make money from the advertising. The major source of the misleading information is from misinformed media posts that come from your average every day person, which are then spread through social media through the readers (Maheshwari). This problem could easily be reduced if the population was not set on making money or receiving credit for an article that just misleads the reader while entertaining them.

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             “Outright disinformation that spreads widely, often through social media or other online platforms, has received much attention in recent years. But biased news, in which strategic edits surreptitiously advance the views of a journalist, editor, or broadcaster, is a far more powerful tool for turning people against their leaders- and one another” (Hamada). Interviewers are known to manipulate the person being interviewed and rewrite their words to fit the particular claim the interviewer was looking for.  This is where the biased news starts, and after it is edited and posted for millions to see, will get shared multiple times and will be across the world in a matter of hours. A majority of the news spread on social media unfortunately is fake news, which is usually made biased by the author of the article being read. While fake news does not have to be biased toward certain people or groups, the articles that do have that biased tone to them end up being the more popular articles because of the readers natural sense to want to read gossip and biased opinions of what is happening in the world. This leads to the sharing of the biased news for entertainment, which is then read more times through friends and family.

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             In the United States, one third or more of the country find news articles untruthful, meaningless, and biased (Shribman). All these factors lead to the reader's sense of uncertainty while reading an article. Is this news article reliable? Is the author creditable in their field of writing? Are the sources used reliable sources for this topic? All These questions run through a reader’s head while they try to find the truth behind a fake news article. Most of the time they will not be able to find the answers they were looking for, and if they do they will probably lead to the article showing its fakeness to the public.

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            So, does the truth really matter in today’s society? “This is no longer a theoretical question for postmodern academics. It is increasingly an existential question for our democracy” (Sykes). As we continue through an era where fake news is abundant in social media and the internet, we can only rely on ourselves to be able to tell what is fact or fiction, which is ultimately disappointing. Whiles fake news can change opinions of the average viewer with one ad article, the people should be told the truth because it ends misleading facts, terminates based opinion, and abolishes the overall uncertainty felt by the consumer.