Quick Evaluation of Good and Poor Media

Vlada Balinsky
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

Recently the world (a.k.a. the internet) has been bombarded with what President Trump likes to call “fake news”. It doesn’t matter whether you like him or not, but he’s kinda right. There are good, accurate, unbiased news sources… and then there is uninformed, quickly noted down, passionate news sources. A proper media article should ask and answer the Five W’s and H (who, what, when, where, why, how) and NOT leave the reader with more questions, confuse, mislead, or provide limited information.

A common sign of a poor article is that it has a very click-bait like title. For example, “The Unexpected Trait 9 Tech Billionaires Share”. It’s a clever title, but is there good content? Not really. You get your answer right away (“They dropped out of college”), which is nice, but this leads to another question that, unfortunately and among other things, is not resolved. The article discusses all 9 billionaires but leaves out very obvious information. These people were prodigies, tech geniuses, well educated either in high school or self-taught. Let’s not forget that most of them attended Stanford and the Ivy League. So what if they dropped out? They dropped out of HARVARD. Clearly these people were going somewhere and they didn’t need to be wasting time in college. This article gives the illusion that anyone can drop out and become a billionaire in a few years, when in reality, you can’t. The article even contradicts itself at the very end, saying that you should apply to UPenn because it has produced the most amount of self made billionaires. The author just proved his entire article invalid in one sentence. Good job.

Most often times a proper article comes from an unbiased news source, such as The Atlantic, which is known to be thorough, provide multiple sources of evidence, and to politically not lean left or right. An example from The Atlantic is “The Most Powerful Publishers in the World Don’t Give a Damn”. This article, like most others, first and foremost provides context and history to the main story before connecting it to the present. It proceeds to answer the biggest questions that come up: “Why do they not give a damn?” “Who is/are the most powerful publishers?” “What do they not give a damn about?” and elaborate on it. Most importantly this article discusses multiple points of view. Those of the publishers, those of the past and present, those for not giving a damn and those concerned with it. Most impressively, the article concludes with the author’s own opinion on the matter, yet she leaves the situation open for the reader to decide for one’s self.