The standard of truth held dear by news media organizations and American culture has been diminished and often disregarded because of the rise of the internet. That is not to say that we were ever entirely truthful. While our version of democracy has always required a certain degree of transparency and communication, we have never shied away from propaganda and smear campaigns and rose-colored depictions of our own society (except when it was inconvenient). However, the internet has given way to a whole new form of communication and unprecedented access to information. People are free to choose whose writing they read and whose version of truth they listen to because there is an overwhelming variety of options and no time to listen to all of them.
And this is bad. It opens new markets. Because we want to hear what we already believe, we seem to have reached the consensus that there is no longer a need for local papers and truthful news, and instead, there needs to be news that's catered towards certain demo/psychographics. All of the images included in this post are screenshots of real websites taken on December 14th. Some of them are utterly ridiculous, and others are ones that some of us might read regularly. All of them are guilty of some level of falsehood. At our school, Fox News is often mocked for its desperate attempts to defend the buffoon we call a president, but CNN is essentially just the inverse.
Because get pick and choose which version of truth be believe in, our view of reality will always be skewed in one direction. Even if we're cognizant of the lopsidedness of our information, we're reluctant to change it because examining an opposite view will be uncomfortable. In some cases, reality has been warped so drastically by various different people at once, and the truth can no longer be distinguished. In other cases, the facts will be presented correctly, but the reaction to them and the way that they are portrayed will change the way they are perceived by an individual.
Our generation has to figure out what to do with this. What's better? Engaging people who would otherwise ignore the news with news by making it entertaining and appealing to them or letting those people fall by the wayside and portraying the most mundane, unbiased account of reality in order to remain truthful?
The internet is great in terms of spreading information, but it's bad at weeding out the falsities and making sure we get access to unbiased information that will help us make informed decisions about our future. If nothing else, I hope you enjoyed the hilarity of some of these news sites.
With these things in mind regarding the current state of media, one must wonder what sort of impact it's going to have on the kids in generation Z, who are almost completely reliant on the internet as their sole source of information about the rest of the world. Each individual in Gen Z is growing up surrounded by 'factual' information that they want to be seeing, and that only validates the beliefs they already have. Although the argument could obviously be made that previous generations have had the same experience (one could choose to watch Fox News over CNN because it presents news in alignment with one's beliefs) the internet feeds one this information much less to their knowledge than has what previously been possible on TV and in the newspaper. Nowadays, if you like one political opinion post on your Instagram explore page, four others will pop up just like it the next day. I've felt this myself, and know personally how it feels to be surrounded with more and more news that further validates the beliefs I already hold. Will this personalization of information and skewing of fact that occurs constantly on Gen Z's sole source of news potentially screw this generation up? Will each individual be overly assured of the validity of their beliefs, and be increasingly intolerant to information that contradicts these beliefs? I wish I knew the answer.
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