Assessment 1

'We Media' and Democracy Assessment


Where did I get my news from?


On a day to day basis, I'm not very proactive when it comes to finding out about the news. (As many young people are similar). I'll come across it on Facebook, Snapchat, the T.V, radio and the Metro newspaper, but I do not go out of my way to find out more. Mostly I hear about things from friends and family and if I am particularly interested in a subject I may go out of my way to find out more. For example, when the story about Harambe the gorilla was released, I heard what happened from friends, saw a link on Facebook and I wanted to find out exactly what had happened. This was mainly because I love animals and I was shocked to hear that the gorilla was shot due to human error. I was introduced to the BBC news app which I found useful for when I wanted to filter what news I saw and when finding out more about a particular subject. But I wasn't checking the app constantly because I'd forget or I had no particular interest in the news.


Do I trust my news sources?


When it comes to social media, I am careful about what I read and believe as many sources are not reliable at all. But because some are, I still read certain news articles off Facebook once I have checked the source.
Some people are more naïve when it comes to believing things they see. Media theorist Andrew Goodwin spoke about this and mentioned how we are all becoming 'monkeys' in the world of media and news and what we believe is true. What he meant by this was we are like puppets, we are fed the information and we believe it without checking the source, and an effect of this is that as a whole we are becoming less intellectual. I agree with this to an extent as there are some individuals out there that do not check the reliability of a source and are believing total nonsense, and then passing false information on.
I trust newspapers and the BBC to a certain extent as I don't believe all information can be trusted as it is only a journalist's idea of events. News is very subjective as to how it is perceived and big companies such as the BBC and ITV have the power to change how a story is interpreted and that effects the people's opinions on different matters. In other words, I think the news has control over our opinions of events and many people will just follow suit and not many will actually question the facts presented.
What is trustworthy about big companies is that they have a bigger budget and are able to send their journalists to where the event is taking place, and collect primary information that has not been twisted or altered through the passage of people.


Other people


When I asked around, I found out what types of news other people were interested in and found out that people of the same age as me (17/18) were into similar categories as I was, such as: food, UK, entertainment, music and older people (24/41) were into the more relevant categories like politics, and education.