Blog Post 6

Hyper competition in the news industry is something that I wanted to touch on first for this week. I think anyone that keeps up with the news at all can testify that the competition has both a huge positive side as well as a negative. I began to think about the way that the New York Times works. Seeing as almost all media sources are channeled online, I began to check their website for my news. The first time I was there though after seeing just a couple of articles, they required a login. Looking further into what it took to create an account, the biggest thing that stuck out to me was the fact that you had to pay to read more. I was perplexed. On one hand, it made sense, you have to pay for a hard copy of the paper so why shouldn't you also have to pay for the online version? But at the same time there are so many other free sources of news online that it almost seemed too easy to just blow off the NYTimes and look elsewhere. I understand that they have a very loyal readership but I'd be very interested to see how much money they were making.

For readers this hyper competition can mean one of two things. Either one readers are getting extremely comprehensive and good coverage of events based on one newspaper wanting to have more information that is more accurate or two it could be the opposite. Newspapers so focused on making a profit may go out of their way to stretch and bend the truth to sound like the best read.

As the book explains focusing so much on the brand of a newspaper causes some journalists lose sight of the “balanced, objective and ethical” demands of their job. I definitely think that a journalist’s primary loyalty should be to their readers but I’m kind of conflicted. I feel like those going into journalism understand that they need to keep the public informed, that’s their job, but they also have to look out for themselves. Following the stockholder theory then that would mean to do exactly what stockholders are asking you to do – increase share prices. But does that get in the way of what has been seen as the primary responsibility of journalists in the past? Where should the line be drawn? We want to expect honest and fair news but how much are we willing to pay for it? I certainly am more wiling to pay for my news instead of looking towards an unreliable source but I don’t know if the majority of people feel that way. I’ve thought about this a lot and I’m just as conflicted as when I began. I’m not sure if there really is a right way. Being honest and transparent feels right but it also seems a bit implausible to expect that all the time from every newspaper when there is so much competition. 

Blog Post 5

         To begin with, I found the beginning of this chapter to be incredibley relevant to not only myself as an individual but to my generation as a whole. I am ashamed to say that the majority of people that I know have little interest or care in the political landscape of our country, despite it affecting them on a daily basis. When my peers do become involved with politics though, they do so in an extremely fair weather fashion. Rarely do we look deeply into current issues or the backgrounds of those that lead us. Thus what media outlets we look too greatly influence our opinions and choices. All too often, we depend solely on a single source of information without bothering to explore. This puts a huge responsibility on the providers of this information. As the book mentioned, it’s somewhat unavoidable to completely dismiss all sorts of bias but the hope is that the reader may be able to discern the bits of truth from the “chaos”. My worry is that with my generation, many have lost this ability.

       When it comes to evaluating whether or not a certain stream of political communication is legitimate, I was a bit perplexed by the books pillars of “virtue”, so to say. I agree that transparency is incredibly important, as later discussed; attempting to manipulate or bend the truth almost always ends badly. I also agree that pluralism is essential to the concept of truthful media, especially when applied to a political realm. Without different voices and sides of the same story, bias can be overpowering and extremely misleading. Yet the last too concepts that the book discusses had me a bit confused. Perhaps I didn’t quite grasp them abstractly, but I couldn’t begin to really understand how they would apply in practice. Verisimilitude is a word I’ve seen a couple of times in my academic career but I don’t really understand how this is applicable to all forms of political communication. Is it the idea that whoever is reporting or speaking on a certain issue must be responsible for the truth behind it? Or is it based off of the concept that when speaking in a political realm all claims must sprout from some sort of verifiable source? I felt the same about ‘practice’. I’m the last person to argue against civic engagement or voting but does every form of political communication need to fall under this category? The book mentions that this framework should only be applied on an individual story or ad level but I still fail to understand how the last two are applicable.

       I was very interested to see what the book had to say about political figures getting elected and the ethics behind this. The book agrees that first and foremost political ads should be based off of factual information. Yet I think anyone in this day an age that has been around for any election can agree that political ads are almost laughable when it comes to completely factual information. I think the “attack ads” as the book mentioned are what most people remember about political ads, which is why they are so dangerous. The comparative ads may be more information rich, but they aren’t what we remember when we think about opposing candidates. Hopefully in the future, political outlets will begin to realize that attack ads negatively affect everyone.