I’m sure by this point everyone has heard about the video showing police officer Ben Fields dragging a black female student out of class at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina this past week.
By Tuesday, thousands of video commentaries and articles were popping up all across the internet revealing what happened in that classroom last Monday.
Now I’m not here right now to comment on what happened between Ben Fields and that student. But what I do want to bring up is the problem that we are all facing when it comes to social media and citizen journalism.
The video that initially pushed this incident into the main limelight was filmed by a student at Spring Valley High School and immediately spread throughout social media, eventually getting picked up by local and national news stations.
Many people watching this video took it at first glance without question, forwarding it and sharing it until just about everyone in the nation saw this brutal, unsolicited attack on a student.
The video was a mere 16 seconds and shows the officer yanking the female student out of her desk and onto the floor.
The video does not have much context before or beyond that.
But that didn’t stop hundreds of media sites from taking that little bit of information and running the field with it.
It wasn’t until another video surfaced from a completely different student and actual interviews were conducted that a full picture came into view. With just a little bit of more information, the readers were given a more accurate depiction of the situation.
And many more people could form their own opinions on the issue.
This is where I have issues with how this whole situation was handled. Again, I don’t care if you choose to side with Officer Ben Fields or if you’re against his handling of the situation.
What I do care about is how the media goes about finding their sources and information, and what they choose to do with this information.
Journalists have a responsibility to their readers to provide the truth.
It should always stay in our minds to be as unbiased when you're writing as you can possibly be. Provide all the facts and information and let it be up to the reader to form their own opinion, because our job as journalists isn’t to tell people how to think.
And when it comes to being both a journalist and a reader, instead of automatically taking one side of the story and running with it, we need to question what we see.
When we receive information from sources, we need to look to see how credible of a source they are. Even if they are a credible source, that doesn’t mean they didn’t miss certain details that might be viable to the story.
Here's little saying that I learned early on in my college career when I had just decided to become a journalist, and I think its time that more people come to this realization.
"There are three sides to every story. Yours, theirs and the truth.”