Anyone who has lived through the rise of digital media since the creation of the internet has been able to watch, and has no doubt noticed, the decline of journalistic integrity. Journalism, once a career heralded for its crucial role in bringing information to the masses, has now become one sullied by the constant need for eye-catching titles and “breaking news” to get people’s attention.
Journalism, which has existed in its current form since the invention of the printing press, was designed to bring information to the public in a timely manner. The creation of the television built off of this, allowing for people to learn the same information faster than they had with newspapers, which eventually led to the development of top news sources. Modern examples of these “top sources” on TV are channels like CNN, Fox News, ABC News, and BBC, all of which have millions of eyes on them every hour.
However, these top news sources have slowly begun to become tainted by this decline in journalism, with such sources being expected to report certain angles of stories depending on the political demographic of their audience. Many people blame news stations for the growing divide between political ideologies, and while they have undoubtedly caused much of this schism, the political stance these news stations take is the result of who will listen.
The foundation of any piece of media, whether it be news, books, or movies, is who will consume it, otherwise known as the media’s “audience.” People will naturally gravitate toward what they want to hear, so if a certain news outlet is providing perspective on an issue that is aligned with the person’s political ideologies, they will continue to watch that outlet. Once this happens with enough people, an audience with similar ideologies will be built, and that news outlet must then continue to provide their audience’s desired information at the expense of unbiased journalism, or they risk losing their viewers. The nature of this process is how all media is built, be it from news outlets to content creators on social media.
The rise of social media has also contributed to this decline in reliable journalism, as several accounts exist across popular platforms, such as Instagram, X (Twitter), and TikTok, that relay news to their followers with little or no qualifications to do so. Oftentimes, these content creators try to be the first to break a story, so they “report” on a recent issue without doing further research, leading to their followers being uninformed of the full story before they, too, spread the news. This fast-paced nature of social media allows misinformation to multiply beyond control within a matter of hours of a story’s development before the full picture is even able to come to fruition.
The term ‘misinformation’ has also become, ironically, a source of misinformation because of how easy it is to throw the word around. A word once used as a way to warn people about possibly inaccurate news has now devolved into a meaningless term given to anything potentially controversial.
All of this isn’t to say “fake news” didn’t exist before the move to televised news, but the speed at which information spreads in the modern-day, both real and fabricated, has resulted in a plethora of unchecked news being fed to the general public. The decline in media literacy has also expedited people’s growing inability to discern real from fake, skills once taught in schools that have slowly begun to be fazed out of curriculums.
The decline of journalistic integrity is a frightening omen of the modern world, and trying to revive journalist integrity is only realistically possible by creating laws to hold accountable those who knowingly spread misinformation. However, this doesn’t mean the issue of the misrepresentation of issues is completely unsolvable, it just means the change will have to come from the people themselves. The best way to combat this decline in journalism and the spread of misinformation is to learn how to discern real from fake, especially when it comes to political issues. Learning media literacy, such as how to cross-reference sources, listening to both sides of the political spectrum, and learning how to recognize political bias, are just a handful of the countless ways this can be achieved.