Exam Question - We Media

I don’t watch or read the news on a daily basis and therefore don’t keep up to date with the main news stories at the time. I would say that the main time that I would really read past the headline would be at the weekend in the newspapers that my grandparents have, usually ‘The Derbyshire Times’ or ‘The Daily Mail’, however, the stories that I usually read are not major news stories. I read the articles about crime, celebrities and the many other weird and wonderful articles that appear; this is because this appeals to me and isn’t too heavy and therefore not as depressing or upsetting as some of the other major news stories. These sources of news are, in my opinion, trusted as they’re available to the to the wider public and they don’t have algorithms like the news websites and social media do which means that the news more unbiased and I have access to everything, not just what my interests usually are. Recently I have also downloaded the BBC News app and therefore can access the news that I’m interested in quickly and easily. 

When I downloaded the BBC News app I enabled the ‘My News’ feature which allowed me to filter the news that I see and the main story that repeatedly appeared was centred on music gigs, media and health because this is what interests me; I like to keep up to date with the gigs to know who’s cancelled and what artists are planning. Many of the stories that I found daily were based around the ‘Foo Fighters’ but again, I rarely read past the headline as Foo Fighters are not a band that I am particularly interested in. This app has a feature where I can choose the things that I see through the ‘My News’ feature whereas social media platforms and other websites learn what you like to see using cookies etc. which worries me as computers start to learn what I like and the internet can adapt the search results to suit me. To me, news stories that come to my attention through social media are not always true and I am more cautious of what parts of the story that I believe and trust as fake news gets shared around the internet on a daily basis, like the death of a celebrity who hasn’t been in the spotlight as much as they used to, forcing them to come out of ‘hiding’ to prove that the story is a hoax. Each time a new news story that I may be interested in becomes available on the app, I get a notification on my phone telling me the main headline, this also happen when a breaking news story appears making me more likely to read the whole article. 

Over the summer I followed a couple of major news headlines that I came across on the internet, the headline was what made me want to read, however, they do often have “click-baiting” headlines to exaggerate the story and increase the chance of readers clicking the link, ultimately earning the corporation’s ad revenue. One of the stories that interested me in particular was the death of Sir Bruce Forsyth at the age of 89. I found this article particularly nice to read considering that it was based on a death; it was full of plans that people had to remember Bruce, including the BBC through a dance tribute during the first episode of ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ as he was the show’s host for years and was also a dancer himself, and the memories that people had with him that would last forever. This news was something that people wanted to share to make sure that everyone was aware of this tragic loss, many tributes were made to him and others sent their condolences to the family that Bruce had left behind. I trusted that this story wasn’t a hoax like many others before it as it was broadcast on TV news as well as TV programmes, social media pages were making tributes of his ‘best moments’ as well as the established news social media pages, it was the main headline on many newspaper covers and everyone knew about it. 

Another news story that took my interest was from the ‘Washington Post’, it was about the arrest of a nurse at work who refused to draw blood from an unconscious patient without a warrant; I read this article in depth and loosely followed the story as it progressed. The patient was involved in a car accident and so the police wanted to draw blood to make sure that they were investigating every aspect of the crash but the officers were told that to draw blood from someone who was unable to consent at the time, they would need a warrant or formal consent to get it, colleagues told him that they would pursue another strategy. When Nurse Alex Wubbels held her ground based on the hospital’s policy, Payne (one of the officers) dragged her screaming from the hospital in handcuffs and held her in a police car outside of the hospital. This only escalated from here as the district attorney asked the FBI to look into possible civil rights violations. This was a news story that people wanted to spread to show the police brutality in some areas of America; others stories like this have previously been shared through the means of social media and that was the only way to get the victim justice. At first I was wary of whether to trust this story or not as I came across it on Facebook in the form of a video and many fake news stories circulate around social media as people can misinterpret video footage and only get one side of the story, but as the story developed and became more popular, I began to see more and more articles on the story in both internet form and newspaper form which led me to trust both the article and the source.