Bleep News: An epidemic in the Modern News World

By Ryan Wagner, August 28th, 2019.

The term known as “fake news” is one that is thrown around quite a bit throughout all news mediascapes. The term was once a very powerful term that held weight when said, but in today’s day and age the term has been reduced to being used by people in an attempt to discredit information that may be true, simply because they disagree. The ease and ability for people to attach this word to different news stories/information has made it a disease. This has caused Julie Posetti, a journalist, to put a red line straight through the phrase on the cover of her new book and even refusing to say it, calling it “Bleep News” in her Facebook Live interview with UNESCO (2018).

                The use of the term has taken like wildfire, especially on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. In our society today, people look to social media for news instead of traditional news sources, a great deal of information is spread through these platforms and for the most part the information is not fact checked. In Bob Wyss book, Covering the Environment, he evaluates some of the difficulties that come with the amount of information that people obtain from social media because the information is easily “miscommunicated” over social media platforms (2019, 200).

                Instead of using the term, “fake news”, Julie Posetti has outlined three different term to identify incorrect information put out by news sources or on social media. Three terms Posetti used are misinformation, disinformation and mal-information, the differences between these three are small yet distinct. Misinformation is when the information isn’t correct but there are no ill intentions, with disinformation it is untrue but with ill intentions and mal-information is based on fact but reinvented so it causes harm to another group or individual (2018).

                So, what is the difference between the social media platforms and their next-door neighbors, multimedia news sites and why is it so important to be able to identify false information on social media? The main difference comes in the quality and the trustworthiness of the information being provided. Both social media and multimedia news sites crank out new information like well-oiled machines, but as author Bob Wyss states, many multimedia news sites focus heavily on the speed and accuracy of stories, even going to such lengths of expanding the number of workers to help make this process as effective as possible (2019, 196-197). In contrast, social media has the ability to get information out faster than these sites but often times information is put out and is taken out of proper context (2018). This is because much of social media’s information is one person’s word over the other. This can create mobs of people fighting with one another over the internet about absolutely nothing, all because they are unable to understand one another’s point of view.

For these reasons, we must filter out some of the information we obtain from social media and turn our attention to sources that follow strict ethical principles like those of the Ethical Journalism Network. Where they put an emphasis on the Truth, Independent Thought, Impartiality, Humanity and Accountability when releasing their information to the world. All the traits you hope to have from your primary source of information, something social media platforms just can’t give us quite yet, if ever.

Sources:

Papagiannis, George and Posetti, Julie. 2018, Journalism, ‘Fake News’ and Disinformation: A Handbook 

for Journalism Education and Training. Online Access: https://en.unesco.org/fightfakenews

Wyss, Bob. Covering the Environment: How journalists work the green beat. 2^nd Edition, New York: Routledge, 2019. Print.

Ethical Journalism Network. The 5 Principles of Ethical Journalism. Online Access:  Five Principles of Journalism