The entire realm of news is undergoing major organizational shifts, whether influenced by economic changes, new digital platforms or an audience that is demographically younger and more diverse. The move online is a key reason there is a growing public distrust of news media sources (Abdulla, 2002). Free access, along with the sudden influx of bloggers and social media users, has inundated the internet with information – some more reliable and verifiable than others. The 2016 presidential election in the United States between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton highlighted a new focus of the web: fake news. This fabricated information is the latest dysfunction of distributed news, where everyone can participate and insert factual or non-factual pieces of news into the public (Steen, 2016). The lack of editorial and gatekeeping rules online are different from the common view of traditional print and broadcast news media, but many young Americans have now grown up with the internet as a central part of their lives. This generational difference results in an interesting gap in much of the current research, as there is little in terms of media research that specifically targets the college-aged demographic.
This issue of credibility in the news is closely tied to a number of other related fields to the news itself, including …show more content…
The article, entitled “Public Trust or Mistrust? Perceptions of Media Credibility in the Information Age” finds that people are largely skeptical of news no matter where it comes from (Kiousis, 2001). Respondents did, however, give newspapers the highest credibility scores – ranking them above the web and television. In relation to my study, there is no longer a big distinction between newspapers and the internet since every major news site that was once a physical paper also has a strong web presence. Credibility rankings nowadays would take both platforms into
This issue of credibility in the news is closely tied to a number of other related fields to the news itself, including …show more content…
The article, entitled “Public Trust or Mistrust? Perceptions of Media Credibility in the Information Age” finds that people are largely skeptical of news no matter where it comes from (Kiousis, 2001). Respondents did, however, give newspapers the highest credibility scores – ranking them above the web and television. In relation to my study, there is no longer a big distinction between newspapers and the internet since every major news site that was once a physical paper also has a strong web presence. Credibility rankings nowadays would take both platforms into