In this day and age news travels fast. Thanks again for that one, technology! It seems that no matter where you turn the hot issues of today are glaring you in the face. On your e-mail’s homepage, the front page of the news paper and the top story on your favorite news station. Sometimes, you don’t even need to look to those things to get your information. A lot of things I find out about are via the ever popular Facebook. Oh, and let us not forget the trending topics on twitter.
I was eleven years old on September 11th, 2001. I distinctly remember watching the first tower burning on the news that morning. I remember going to school and my friend asking why all of the teachers were freaking out. “A plane hit a building in New York,” I told him. To which he told others. When we sat in class that day we asked our teacher if we could watch the news. He took a moment before deciding that we could and called the other 6th grade teachers and asked them to bring those kids into the classroom and we would all watch together. All day the 50 or so 6th graders sat in a room on the floor with the lights off watching the media coverage. It’s what my family watched when I got home. We were glued to the TV for a long time and that’s exactly how that news came. Person to person and through the news station.
I was eighteen on November 4th, 2008. I was in my women’s history class at AVC. My friend and I were anxiously waiting the results of the presidential election, which I’d voted in early that morning. Finally, during our break we left our class early. I dropped her off at her home and started driving home. Half way there, my phone rang and I read the text message, “Obama wins!” I watched the coverage the rest of the night, now awaiting the results of Proposition 8. I went to bed before those results and woke up the next morning with the news station on but still no results. Finally, I went online to see that it had passed. Full of disbelief, I kept searching the sites and checked back again that night after work. After several of my “trusted” sites and finally the news stories on it, I could believe it.
I learned of the death of pop icon Michael Jackson through a text message, the resignation of Rahm Emmanuel from twitter, the repeal of Prop 8 on Yahoo. While this is the way that I learned of news, this isn’t the way that I confirm the news. I check over and over again, watch several news programs, check the news papers and read online articles before I can decide what is real and what isn’t. I find that in general I can still with a few reliable sources and somewhat ignore the others. But in these times we need to be careful of simply believing what we read. Not only is there a large amount of bias but sometimes I feel that these sources steal from each other and facts get misinterpreted. While it is good to be informed, it’s better to be properly informed.
You bring up a very valid point that technology is changing the way we get our news. We often get our news from others or new technological innovations such as Twitter or Facebook and then turn to the media for more information. This method of getting news is one which the fewer words used the better and results in a limited story with little information reaching us so to find out more we hit the traditional media to explore what we want to learn more about. Society has become so fast paced that we have little time for viewing or reading article but a quick post or blog becomes our source for much of what is occurring. This can be good as we get the news when it is happening but often, the whole story or even the actual events that occurred are not correct as the investigation into it has yet to be done by the media. Your have a very good point as well that often one source steal or uses the same information from another and puts a little twist on it to make it their own. This can lead to a lot of misinformation being given.
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