Blog #1 — A Change in Perspective
Tragically, the world we are presently living in requires our utmost attention at all times. Wars, famine, fires, riots, and pandemics are undergoing at an ever-increasing amount. In times such as these, where it is an acute obligation to stay informed, staying connected is undoubtedly the premier approach. The tyranny of now imposes a never-ending state of stories and platforms to stay connected with to maintain the most informed understanding of every world issue. But when our news is over-saturated, truth becomes subjective. The growing prevalence of fake news and obscene bias goes increasingly unnoticed, and begins to shape our world more than the truth. Real-life consequences of unknowing manipulations against the average person become a blindspot in the guise of staying connected.
I harbour steadfast political beliefs and world views. I am a communist at heart, and a leftist in practice. However, above my placement on the political spectrum, I value the truth. The pervasiveness of false reporting and disguised biases embedded within the surplus of news content today is egregious and impenetrable; impossible to avoid or identify. Consequently, I select my news outlets carefully. Choosing to obtain my news from fact-based reporting with as little political bias as possible is the closest option towards understanding the truth. Using exclusively nonpartisan wires such as the Associated Press, The Conversation, and platforms like AllSides I am able to view other news through a critical lens by extracting only what I know to be the truth.
The Associated Press reporting is used as source material for multiple other established new sources.
The Conversation is research-based reporting with extensive third-party analysis, with articles often written by academics of the respective field.
AllSides is a platform which carefully selects other news stories based on providing “balanced news and civil discourse”. This site has a useful feature called the “Red/Blue dictionary” which provides refined and unbiased definitions of nuanced political words to help others understand and engage in meaningful political discourse.
For the 24-hour news replacement, I chose to replace my regular news with unreliable “fake news” from outlets with a heavy political bias and penchant for false reporting. I used the Interactive Media Bias Chart from adfontsmedia.com to select the sources described as hyper-partisan propaganda, on both the left and right sides.
I first noticed that all politically hyper-partisan sources seemed to exclusively cover American politics, nothing on any front page regarding world issues, of which there is an abundance of at this point in time. Though this experiment, I hoped to gain a detailed understanding of the skewed reality someone who reads these sources may experience.
WorldTruth, the lowest news source on the Bias Chart’s reliability scale yet seemingly centrist, had such inaccurate conspiracy-driven content that its stories seemed inherently facetious.
Top News Story: Eugenicist Bill Gates demands “Digital Certificates” to Prove CoronaVirus Vaccination Status. The article proceeds into intense anti-vaccination discourse and lightens a COVID vaccine to a eugenics practice.
Real life implication: People mislead into not getting vaccine for disease that has killed 1.06 million people and will continue to kill more.
Breitbart, an extremely popular news source among right-wing Americans, boasted a top story about the Portland Protests; Calling the protests antiFa and anti-police, complaining that of 300 arrested, only cases for 19 are pending. Breitbart politicize their vocabulary to fit a pro-Republican, and specifically anti-Liberal agenda. This is problematic as many American’s trust Breitbart as a reliable source, further pushing the far-right into a confirmation bias. The ‘selective exposure theory’ would suggest websites like these are creating echo chambers for readers, greatening the divide between right and left.
Both these websites and the countless others I skimmed through are inherently problematic and are spreading misleading information that is actively radicalizing and incubating dangerous political beliefs. This 24-hour experiment has implored the importance of using fact-checking and source-verifying websites like Allsides and tools like the Interactive Media Bias Chart to find reliable sources for news. A truth-driven narrative in news has the potential to save the world.