Fairly frequently, when I mention to people that I spend the first part of my mornings looking at the news as posted by the CBC, the Globe and Mail and occasional CTV, people criticise my news sources. They suggest that I am reading news that is biased. Of course I am. I fully admit that neither of those two news sources are in any way neutral. They both are biased to, at best, the Canadian center. There are hundreds of other internet based news sources that I could use including Al Jazeera, Huffington Post and Reddit. Many of those sources are legitimate news agencies that work hard to gather news. Even the best of those sources are as biased as is the CBC or the Globe and Mail. To suggest that some sources are less biased than others is naive. Those sources may be biased in a different direction, but they are biased just the same. If someone trusts one source more than an other, in all likelihood their choice has far more to do with the fact that they agree with the bias.
Unfortunately,
because of the plethora of sources available, some people are turning to
completely unreliable sources. According to a story posted on the CTV website,
Facebook is becoming a trusted source of news. Pew
Research has reported that
according their data, up to 62% of Americans get at least some of their news
from Facebook. Other social media sites are only slightly less popular. The
research suggests that the majority of Americans are still getting some of
their news from either more traditional sources or using the internet to look
up news sites. However, the number of people who are using Facebook, Instagram
and LinkedIn as a news source is increasing. I found it surprising that those
Americans who identify themselves as Democrats or Independent are more likely
to use social media sources to get at least some of their news than those
Americans who identify themselves as Republicans. Perhaps less surprising
the same research suggests that people with some post-secondary education are
generally more likely to use social media as are people who define themselves
as white.
Facebook
is not a news gathering agency! They re-post information that someone thinks is
important, useful, scandalous or scintillating. Anyone who is getting their
news solely from Facebook or other similar sources will be either misinformed
about some of the issues or at best, get an unbalanced view. Unlike news
agencies such as the CBC, the Globe and Mail, the Huffington Post or Al Jazeera
Facebook is not held accountable for the news that it posts.
I
think the internet is wonderful. I use it daily for all kinds of things from
how to build a flower box to the bus schedule in what ever city I am visiting,
to the side effects of the medication I am on. But one needs to choose the
sites carefully and to check, especially in the case of things like
medications, sites that have legitimacy. But I do not use the internet to look
up or for news stories on Facebook, nor do I believe very much of what I read
there
There are far better sites than Facebook for news – people should use them.
