Fake News and The Future of Journalism (Essay Sample)

Fake News and The Future of Journalism
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Fake News and The Future of Journalism
Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential elections in the United States by spreading fake news in support of Trump's campaign brought fake news to the forefront. These revelations sparked global outrage and highlighted a socially ingrained journalistic quandary – fake news and its impact on how people consume information. Fake news is as old as actual news, and Pablo Boczkowski delves into the topic in depth, examining why it is so prevalent in today's journalistic and information consumption culture. He delves into the reception dynamics that support its current prevalence, focusing his argument on how modern technology makes it easier to receive and spread news and information. This paper defends Boczkowski's claim that fake news is an inherent component of modern information ecology and has three primary pessimistic consequences that oppress today's media reporting culture.
Every aspect of modern life is infiltrated by technology. This technology makes it easier to spread and receive fake news and data. As a result, purveyors of fake news take advantage of gaps in this established information infrastructure to spread their misinformed and distorted views (Boczkowski, 2016). Such people structure their stories in a distinctively appealing manner in order to attract a large audience. As a result, echo chambers and communities emerge on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp, where propaganda supporting their shared beliefs spreads virally (Bovet & Makse, 2019). These platforms broaden the size and scope of the audience that fake news can reach horizontally. As a result of an established high-tech information infrastructure with a broad reach in scale and scope, Boczkowski believes that fake news spreads faster today than it did in the past.
Fake news is a plague that is slowly eroding information's veracity. Because of the internet's pervasiveness, people can easily create and share stories alongside traditional media, potentially reaching a global audience in minutes through online shares and clicks. As a result, Boczkowski (2016) discusses three primary effects, all of which revolve around its roles in misinforming and distorting credible information. For starters, it has instilled distrust in and discredited the mainstream information infrastructure; people prefer stories shared by their contacts to those shared by established news organizations. Second, it has hampered people's ability to detect bias in media reporting. Google and Facebook, for example, closely guard their selection method and rely on algorithms developed by people with inherent biases to curate their stories. As a result, it is difficult for their audiences to devise strategies to detect this bias, resulting in politics in code. Third, fake news distorts information, resulting in a crisis of cultural authority. People no longer place as much trust in scientific, medical, educational, and journalistic knowledge as they once did. For example, claims that vaccines cause autism, despite experts' assurances to the contrary. According to Boczkowski (2016), all possible short-term solutions, such as more robust algorithms to eliminate fake news sources and stronger sanctions on such sources, will not resolve the issue. Fake news broadcasters can quickly resume their operations elsewhere. As a result, he is pessimistic about journalism's short-term prospects.
Fake news is spread with the help of digital communication tools. They reach a large number of people and provide access to unofficial and unsubstantiated stories. One such tool is social media, which is rife with backlinks to numerous fake news stories. During the 2016 presidential elections, social media spread fake news, endangering the democracy, social institutions, and bureaucracy of the United States. These stories disseminate misinformation and hyperpartisan viewpoints in order to influence people's voting habits. At the time, the average American “saw and remembered 0.92 pro-Trump and 0.23 pro-Clinton fake news stories” (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). These stories also include sensitive scientific, medical, educational, and social stories that misrepresent and misinform Americans. They distort information to fit a story. Reports of COVID-19 vaccines causing infertility in women, for example, have discouraged many women from receiving the vaccine, despite its proven morbidity (Cha, 2021). Other vaccines and medical procedures have also been falsely reported to cause one or more fatal or unfavorable side effects, discouraging Americans from seeking professional assistance. Overall, fake news is a scourge that threatens American democracy, as evidenced