Project 3: Multimedia Streaming

With everything that has happened in the past few years, I think there is one thing everything can agree on: there are some issues people have with the media. There have been countless stories all stemming from just one quote or one short clip. These stories have a way of changing and morphing as they pass through the filter of social media and end up looking much different to the people seeing it for the first time from social media instead of the news source it was from.

Do you ever remember playing the game telephone? If not, it is a simple game that demonstrates how a phrase can change bit by bit as it is passed down a chain. The same thing is happening to quotes and clips taken from news and press conferences. For example, in July President Trump held a press conference in the Rose Garden about COVID cases and testing.

In this press conference he discussed testing and its effect and prevalence in the news. However, many people were first exposed to this story through social media that claimed the President said that if we didn’t test, we wouldn’t have as many cases. This quote was part of a larger discussion that has a different meaning than the one taken out of context.

Social media spread the quote and soon there were many thousands of people who believed the misquote in its out-of-context state. Social media then acted as an echo chamber which only heightened the outrage against the president. However, simply searching for the entire quote by people exposed to the story from social media would both show them the truth of the quote and show how careful people must be when getting news from social media.