As a journalism student, one of the first things that I learned was the concept of "The Fourth Branch of Government." Our government was designed on the concept of checks and balances among the three branches, so essentially the fourth branch is the media: the press' job is to report on the actions of the government and call them out should they need to. The media's job is to tell viewers the truth, they untangle confusing and unnecessary quotes to put them in normal people term yet above all they tell the truth. The thing is, the people need to start stepping up and calling out the media.
In today's society, with all of the political unrest we see from both sides (and don't get me wrong, I am a fairly un-political person) the media seems more and more skewed. People tend to trust the media just as far as they can throw them and as a student who is constantly being told journalists become journalists to fight this notion, it is so frustrating to see both the headlines being put into the world and the viewers so willing to believe what they want to in each article.
Readers need to understand that a large amount of the articles they are fed serve the purpose of furthering someone's agenda. It's not fair to anyone when you believe an article that supports your beliefs, but call an opposing article blasphemous when it tries to contradict them.
Even though the media is supposed to be keeping tabs on the government, who is going to keep tabs on the media? If two articles are written where the facts so clearly contradict each other go out and find the truth. Don't let someone's personal agenda cloud your own beliefs, if you want information then it is your job to find it.
We need to break the cycle where so-called 'important' people are brainwashing the minds of naive and susceptible youth, being ignorant is not an excuse in this political climate and just because you read a story from Fox doesn't mean the same facts are being delivered on CNN.
Another important thing to remember — many journalists who set out to tell the truth try to deliver on it. Big corporations are the ones who get in the way of just the facts being delivered, and they make the journalists twist a quote to seem a certain way, and create a bias in their writing. It's not fair, but it is definitely a problem that journalists are facing.
So often it's easy for us to believe what we want to, and when an article basically hand feeds us with the material we want to be true it's easy to stop and leave it at that. Just remember when gathering information, especially on sensitive topics, that agendas are involved and it is your responsibility to find the truth among all of the different articles pitching you different claims.
