TTU Professor Dr. Cam Stone (Photo from TTU website)
While the media’s role in society may be to provide the public with accurate, honest information, Americans see bias in the news media as increasingly problematic, according to the Knight Foundation.
Dr. Cam Stone, professor practice of journalism and creative media industries at Texas Tech, said being a reporter is a “weighty position” and mistakes made by the media have caused people to distrust the media.
“People are making decisions about their life based on what reporters are bringing them. And if a reporter is lying and the President is saying that there is fake news being generated,” Stone said. “That’s going to cause a lot of public mistrust in what the news media are doing, there’s no other way around it.”
Dr. Randy Reddick, Morris Professor of Journalism at Texas Tech, said he is somewhere between “disappointed and dismayed” with the mainstream media’s journalistic practices over the years that have resulted in distrust.
TTU Professor Dr. Randy Reddick (Photo from TTU website)
“There have been some very high-profile gaffes, that the media have committed in the last 10-15 years, that have hurt media reputation,” Reddick said. “There have been economic issues that have basically pulled the teeth out of particularly, TV news.”
In a poll, 43% of people said they have very little confidence in television news while 9% of people had a great deal of confidence in television news, according to Gallup.
Haley Pratt, a senior journalism major at Texas Tech from San Antonio, said she thinks the mainstream media has changed over the years and become less reliable.
“All of the different media platforms and news networks are just competing for attention, views, and money,” Pratt said. “They’ll project things that might not be true or that they think will be intriguing to viewers.”
Texas Tech Journalism Student Haley Pratt (Photo from Haley Pratt)
Americans believe the media is attempting to push a specific agenda flooded with their own biases because of inaccuracies reported to the public, according to the Knight Foundation.
Reddick said he is let down by the way the media has responded to the “political machinations” surrounding the fake news media accusations in recent years.
“What has been sorely disappointing to me, and disheartening, is watching the media take the bait,” Reddick said. “And to some extent, fake news has been around a long time.”
Stone said mainstream media has taken a “beating” over the last decade.
“The media has kinda got a black-eye in the public’s view for a lot of reasons, and it has been going on a while,” Stone said. “Where I start seeing the downfall of it was with Jayson Blair.”
According to SPJ, Jayson Blair was an American journalist and reporter for the New York Times who was found guilty of fabricating material and creating fake sources.
Stone said he believes Blair’s activities sparked an overwhelming concern for skepticism from the American people surrounding the journalism industry.
“That really started the downfall of distrusting the media, I mean if this guy could work for the New York Times, one of the pillars of news information of news in America,” Stone said. “And he can get away with it, what the heck else is happening in other places.”
About averydishaw
