Media Manipulation, continued
Media Manipulation: A Growing Threat to National Safety Part 2
When I ended last time, the conclusion I came to was that we have to find alternate sources of information that aren’t controlled by biased corporations, which led us to the internet. Internet news was our next big problem. When you look online, you have large amounts of inaccurate sources to choose from.
As previously stated, the cause of this inaccuracy is open content. The media and information generated online is created by a limitless number of individuals. I conducted a survey asking students from my school if they had ever received and used incorrect information that they found on the web. 67% of the 27 polled responded yes. Of that 18, seven said that they used answer sites like Ask.com and yahooanswers or wikipedia. These are all sites where the content is user generated.
On the other side of the argument, other large information sites have been becoming more incorrect over the years. As you can see in this 2009 graph from the Pew Research Center for People and Press, people are becoming more and more critical of the accuracy of large corporate news sources.
You can find the entire article here.
Finding information is up to you. You want to find unbiased sources when doing your research, from respectable organizations. Some good examples of information sites to use are PBS and BBC. According to Fair.org, the ways you can look for unbiased information include looking for the amount of corporate ownership of the organisations, the diversity, whether it is ethnic, gender, or cultural, and to observe who the information is coming from.You can read the entire article here.
When I ended last time, the conclusion I came to was that we have to find alternate sources of information that aren’t controlled by biased corporations, which led us to the internet. Internet news was our next big problem. When you look online, you have large amounts of inaccurate sources to choose from.
As previously stated, the cause of this inaccuracy is open content. The media and information generated online is created by a limitless number of individuals. I conducted a survey asking students from my school if they had ever received and used incorrect information that they found on the web. 67% of the 27 polled responded yes. Of that 18, seven said that they used answer sites like Ask.com and yahooanswers or wikipedia. These are all sites where the content is user generated.
On the other side of the argument, other large information sites have been becoming more incorrect over the years. As you can see in this 2009 graph from the Pew Research Center for People and Press, people are becoming more and more critical of the accuracy of large corporate news sources.
You can find the entire article here.
Finding information is up to you. You want to find unbiased sources when doing your research, from respectable organizations. Some good examples of information sites to use are PBS and BBC. According to Fair.org, the ways you can look for unbiased information include looking for the amount of corporate ownership of the organisations, the diversity, whether it is ethnic, gender, or cultural, and to observe who the information is coming from.You can read the entire article here.
The way I see it, we as a population have a responsibility to do one of three things. We need to report the raw facts, without trying to defend our ratings or image, if we are in a position where it is of the concern. We need to have unbiased and accurate information if we are trying to spread knowledge. Fair is a website actively supporting accuracy and unbiasedness on the internet. Finally, it is our personal duty to know how to detect fraud on the internet. I plan on creating a video documenting and providing help with internet research. Thank you for your time and interest, and I hope this article has been helpful.
For my entire annotated bibliography, look here.
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