#7 Exploiting a News Story

 Can We Really Trust the News


    In today's world, we receive news in a lot of different ways. For example, television, magazines, email, mail, social media, or if you are from a small town like I am, then you receive a lot of news just from gossip, and trust me it spreads like a wildfire. Depending on the age of a person determines where you will usually get your news from. Older individuals are more than likely going to get their information from the television on their local news channel, middle-aged people are probably going to get a lot of their news from Facebook, and teenagers are getting information from platforms such as Tik Tok. To put it into numbers, 31% get their news from Facebook, 13% from Twitter, 22% from Youtube, 11% from Instagram, 6% from Tik Tok, and 4% from Snapchat. 



    Using Magnolia as an example growing up, you wanted to be the one to know the news and exploit it to all of your friends first. It was always coming to school the next day and meeting up with your friends and usually, the conversations would start off with "oh my gosh did you hear what that girl did yesterday? just to get a rise out of them. Whether it is true or not, those friends are going to go tell their friends and so on. The same thing with social media, everyone wants to be the storyteller so they will receive all the attention. The thing about most of these stories that we are exploiting to our friends or over social media, they may not be one-hundred percent true half of the time.


    

       Something you see on Tik Tok quite a bit is people sharing videos about something that has happened to them but not giving the full story and the comment section is blown up with people asking for a storytime. Often times you will also see people post stories about other people that they know and give little information. This is because the little amount of information you give people, the more curious they are going to be. On Tik Tok, you can find videos that makeup artists will post of them doing their makeup while telling a story that is not really their story and they will inform you of that. The question to ask yourself is are you watching because you like the makeup look or did the story that she is telling catch your attention? For example, in this screenshot below, an individual on Tik Tok posted a video of an incident with a cop but gave no context in order to keep people coming back for more. 



    You will also run across fake news accounts on social media trying to impersonate a local news sight in order to spread fake or controversial information as the Russians did during the election in 2016. Also, when the pandemic hit, at first no one knew what the coronavirus really was or how it affected people. You would see so many articles and news reports saying to watch out for certain symptoms and people arguing over which masks worked better and no one actually knew the answer. People were terrified because of news stories they were hearing about people dying all over the world when in reality people were dying from covid-19 just like people died from the flu the news just made it seem that much scarier. 

    Determining whether the gossip and news you hear are completely up to you. Words get twisted, people tell lies, and there will always be fake news. It is very important to exploit stories so that we stay informed on what is going on in the world and in local towns but you never know what is the entire truth. 

    

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