Before “objectivity” was emphasized on, journalists back in the days used to “stick to the facts” and they used to report everything and not leave out anything in order to give their audience nothing except the truth (Ward, 2008, p.73). This is how journalism is supposed to be, the use of objectivity nowadays is decreasing and a new wave of journalism trends are coming in; “fake news” is now everyone’s cup of tea; fake news has become so crazy popular to the certain extent where journalists are mocking Trump and his false information by creating something called “Fake News Awards” (Appendix A).
Objectivity is the only thing that’s keeping the journalism workspace a democracy; because of the similarity and no opinionated pieces. Currently, journalists are actually leaning on biasedness, unfairness and fake news because this is what the people want to read. According to the documentary “Trumping Democracy”, the trump supporter from Staten Island only gets his sources from the internet; and some of them are actually fake for example there was an article where they said that Hilary’s votes were fake but this article is not even true and reliable but the guy immediately believed it because people actually would trust anything they read off the internet and because the article is bashing the contestant that is running against Trump. Journalists tend to not like objectivity because as stated it permits them from writing detailed and opinionated press. They tend to write their own pieces and actually prefer articles that have strong or convincing point of views. “She found that participants spent 36 percent more time reading articles that agreed with their point of view. They had a 58 percent chance of choosing articles that supported their views” (Hsu, 2009). As a result of their dislike towards Objectivity, Journalists tend to reject objectivity.
All social media platforms have one thing in common which is each of them have an algorithm.
Algorithms tend to depend on our news feed and what we like, and that’s why the first post we see is the most relevant and interesting because it all depends on us. Google — the most popular and used search engine — reveals their websites based on their visits and likeability. Google does not follow the theory of objectivity since it only focuses on the highly visited and noticeable websites, and place the other websites in the end, but this also depends on us. Our activity and frequent visits to these websites is a reason for this objectivity, but because of this algorithm Google is unknowingly affecting other companies because of this placement, and some people are actually quitting their jobs due to this. But for every con there are pros, Google really benefits people with their placement, because it simplifies their search and they find what they want immediately, also they show us the most relevant and most accessed websites which is also beneficial. Google (in my opinion) is the only one -between Facebook and Twitter- that filters the content in a manner people want to see. Facebook actually sort out their posts depending on our profile and activity, but that’s only because it’s something we agreed to in the terms and conditions so technically they have the right to do that. Lotan talks about the different cases of how news spread rapidly which lead to several tweets that were fake. People who actually use twitter tend to know information prior than others because of how fast tweets are spread. For example, when Obama was about to give an unexpected speech regarding Bin Laden’s death. It all started out with a tweet from a person saying that Bin Laden is dead; he tweeted that before Obama was about to give his speech. The tweet resulted in several replies, in which most of them were false (Lotan, p.108). Another case similar to Facebook’s algorithm is Instagram. Starting 2017, Instagram update their app and changed a feature in which resulted in negative consequences. Instagram changed the placement of the posts into a non-chronological order making it similar to Facebook’s algorithm. Instagram started to rank their posts depending on the engagement with other people, and what we prefer. The change in this algorithm affects the idea of Objectivity because the posts that are appearing on our feed are the ones we enjoy the most and are the ones we want to see; but there is a slight percentage of us unknowingly avoiding other diverse posts.
Algorithmic media have definitely disrupted the role of Objectivity and impartiality in news reporting, but mostly in social platforms. Journalists do not mind writing pieces their own biased opinion, on the contrary they actually prefer that. My concern is not the lack of Objectivity in News reports, because Journalists are coming up with diverse and better pieces than their previous ones. Some solutions may include is reversing to their old algorithm or proceed with this algorithm but not eliminate impartiality, maybe they can take into consideration the struggling companies that result in failure because of their algorithm and help them.
References
Carbone, L. (2018, February 19). This is How the Instagram Algorithm Works in 2018. Retrieved from https://later.com/blog/how-instagram-algorithm-works/
Hsu, J. (2009, June 7). People Choose News That Fits Their Views. Retrieved from https://www.livescience.com/3640-people-choose-news-fits-views.html
Huchon, T. (Director). (2017, December 5). Trumping Democracy [Video file]. Retrieved from http://imdark.com/Watch-trumping-democracy-2017-full-movie-online/
The Highly-Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards. (2018, January 17). Retrieved from https://www.gop.com/the-highly-anticipated-2017-fake-news-awards/
Ward, S. J. (2008). Truth And Objectivity .
