This week’s topics focus on Politics, Subversion of Democracy, News “fake”, and Digital Activism. I read an article called ” Long time NBC reporter quits,” watched “John Oliver on Journalism,” and another article about Facebook and if they can fix their own bug. While watching the clip of John Oliver, he talks about journalism and how the media and news take the information from the newspaper and incorporates it into their stories. He explained how the news casts and media don’t do much of their own reports and simply uses others and they now want the newspaper companies to write, tweet, post and all of that and it is a lot to ask for so things eventually get messed up. I found that rather interesting. Also he stated that they are starting to decline now and without the papers digging into information, it will be all surface things and now actual news… He gave an example at the end making fun of it turning it into a joke. The video were these actors at the newspaper and they had a story of a corrupt politician but they did not care and wanted to focus on puppies instead because that was going to get them the most likes and views. So Instead of reporting actual news, they are going to report things they think the public would want to see or read and this generates more revenue and likes I guess. That explanation to me was pretty eye opening and rather scary.. I feel as though reporting real events and news is way more important than just generating likes or ” what the people might want to see’ instead of what we need to see.

I then read the article called ” Long time NBC reporter quits,” and he talks about why he quit and everything behind his reasoning. He states that some journalism has steered away from reporting actual news and have gone into a realm where they are now commentators to what is going on. He states that it is a tricky situation because they are supposed to be unbiased but also be reporting what is happening in the world. Also, because of this, news coverage has begun to get shallower and shallower thus not getting deep coverage of the event. To comment on this, I absolutely hate when news cast put their own opinion on events. I like to see all the information and come to an opinion on my own and of course by doing so on the news, it makes so that they are biased which means I can not fully trust the news report. This really takes away from news reporting because people need the facts and information, not your personal opinion. This also leads to lack of reporting and coverage which is crucial because we can’t just have half the information… This leads to people being misinformed and “fake news” being spewed out to the public so no one knows what is real or not. What are your thoughts on this subject ?

Here is a link to an article about fake news and its impact.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/14/eaay3539