Reflections — The Media and How to Deal With It

As always this semester has come to an end much faster than expected. Nevertheless, this course has extended my knowledge of media issues. So as a short overview, I summarized the most important facts I learned to keep in mind when dealing with social media:

1. Be more critical. There might be a bunch of crap written in a somehow plausible way, which does not mean that it has to be true. Fake news is a much more serious issue and people even earn a lot of money while producing it.
2. The media do not always have to be correct. While trying to be the fastest reporting news source, there can be serious mistakes e.g. when journalists only read the first page of an important document.
3. The consumption of newspapers drops every year and some newspaper companies even try to motivate young people with special editions explaining how to successfully integrate a newspaper into daily life. Nevertheless, they may be more successful in focusing on local issues in order to be unique.
4. Consider several news sources. There may be important topics that are omitted by some media sources for several reasons and others might cover them, e.g. the murder of a student in Freiburg, which was not reported by the tagesschau.
5. It is generally hard to control fake news. Facebook might be a superpower concerning advertising but it still has to figure out how to eliminate false reports.
6. How do newspapers stay alive? — Mostly through advertising and funding.
7. As known before, facebook collects a lot of personal data, but it uses all this together with a certain algorithm in order to develop an individual start page depending on your personal interests.
8. Things can always end up differently than expected as demonstrated by the presidential election campaign that might have cost several media institutions some money as they had expected another result.
9. Some journalists only copy and paste several passages of a former text without any critical reflection — also known as churnalism.
10. There can be different opinions about to which extent it is okay to reveal a public person’s private life if it serves public interest.