Breaking News and the Lack of Accuracy

For my Reading and Writing for Emerging Media class, we have article that we have to read and then respond to. This is the response to one of those instances where I really felt like expanding more on the response I submitted:

Maybe it’s just my distrust of the media that I’ve adopted over the past few years, but I’m not at all surprised by these articles.

[These are the articles we had to read:

 Question Everything You Hear
When News Breaks
The Pressure to be the TV News Leader Tarnishes a Big Brand 
]

News has become a business and everyone is looking to get the latest scoop. They want to be the first to report it, so people will get used to looking to them for the latest events. The more people that look to them for information, the more money they make.

It’s a terribly sad fact that accuracy has been thrown out the window. I really wish that news providers would go back to the system of reporting facts above having the bragging rights of being the first on the scene, but I don’t believe that the media will shift back that way unless people stop consuming the incorrect information, which won’t happen because no one can tell that the broadcasted ‘facts’ are incorrect when its dealing with developing events. Without the push to change, news outlets won’t see the need to check facts for breaking news because their viewers are still consuming the news they give their viewers, so I don’t see that they really ever will.

People want to be in on the latest trend and that includes knowing the most recent news, so there will always be a market for breaking news. We like to show how much we know and we want to be the smartest and most informed. That means that we will tune into the breaking news stories or do a bit of research online so that when these new topics come up in conversation, which it will, we can show how informed we are.

I definitely think there are people who just want to know information and that’s why they like the news, but I still feel like there is a large group of us (I say us because I know I can fall into this) where we hear breaking news stories and become proud when we can impart some of our knowledge on the issue to others.

This could even be expanded outside of breaking news. So many political debates, I feel, are fueled by this need to be right and show how your informed opinion makes you know best. We all have such varying opinions and that’s why politics is such a precarious topic.

Getting back to the original point of this, reporting news isn’t going to change because people won’t change this system that they helped craft into being. News consumption changed with the birth of the internet and people want more information, faster. In order to keep up and be the best, the news media had to give something up: accuracy.

It’s a system that I wish could change for the better, but I don’t see how it can.