By Susanna Meyer, Times-Republican
The invention of the internet has changed journalism a lot over the years, and during Professor Michael Bugeja’s Thursday lecture “Fakes, Hacks, Fibs and Tales: Journalism Ethics” on Zoom, he dug into how news has slowly warped into opinion, what role social media plays in the problem and how to combat it both in the short term and the long term.
Bugeja teaches media ethics, technology and social change at Iowa State University (ISU) and was the second speaker for this year’s Shear-Colbert Symposium lecture series at Marshalltown Community College (MCC). The theme of the 2022 symposium — which was originally organized by the late history professor Tom Colbert — is “Fact or Fake: Information Today.”
Bugeja started his presentation by discussing how the distribution of news has changed in recent years and said more people now get their information from social media instead of directly from news outlets. He also went on to address how little confidence people had in the accuracy of the news they consumed.
“Seventy-two percent of Republicans expect the news to be incorrect, 46 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of independents feel this way. So if you believe that the news is fake, why are you viewing it? The answer to that is because it’s convenient to do so,” Bugeja said.
In the past, the public had to wait for the next news cycle to get reports, allowing time for fact checking. Bugeja said the internet has created an instant gratification culture which does not always provide enough time to ensure the accuracy of information. Furthermore, because a large portion of the population gets their news for free online, fewer reporters are in the field due to a lack of income.
Bugeja also showed a media bias chart, which sorted an array of news organizations into left leaning, right leaning and neutral categories. He said the neutral middle is less appealing because it is both crowded and unprofitable.
“Consumers want news on demand but then pundits tell you how to feel about it, and that’s important because the margins are too low in the more objective middle,” Bugeja said.
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