In the twenty-first century, American newspapers are struggling to keep their circulation figures high. Nightly network newscasts continue to shrink in audience share. Economic surveys of the American news industry suggest that mainstream news institutions have been challenged financially by expanding news and entertainment options online. Today, traditional news media organizations struggle to reinvent themselves and preserve their audience.
At the same time, however, new Internet media provide unparalleled opportunities for Americans to produce or contribute to their own news stories. In this way, the Internet has served to erode barriers between professional journalism and citizen amateurs. As University of Southern California professor Marc Cooper observed in a New York Times article, “There are all types of people out there who maybe aren’t journalists, but who can commit acts of journalism.” The implications of all this for the future of news in America, and for a truly informed American public, remain to be seen.
Today, it is easy to cover a news event and to blog about it online, even lacking journalistic credentials. During the 2008 election, experiments with online-based citizen news, much of it with a strong partisan bias, was fully underway. An influential new organization was www.offthebus.net, or OTB, which enrolled thousands of ordinary citizens to gather information about the ongoing campaign. OTB was inspired, in turn, by Arianna Huffington, whose site Huffington Post has become a favorite of liberal and progressive readers. In the more conservative camp is the Drudge Report. As these examples suggest, now more than ever it is important to be alert to the possibility of bias in your online media diet. But the available resources of information, and the range of citizens providing them, has never been greater.
1. To begin studying what news is available online, research the traditional news publications available.
One good starting list can be found compiled at Project Vote Smart, located at: http://www.votesmart.org/news_media_resources.php
This site lists a broad range of online magazines and newspapers representing a variety of ideological perspectives. Choose an online media source that you have never visited before and find its coverage of a political issue that you care about.
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| 1a. Which media source did you choose? |
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| 1b. About what issue did you read? |
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| 1c. How did that media source present an issue that you care about? Did you agree with its coverage? Why or why not?
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| Learn to be a better consumer of news. Make sure your facts are correct. Honest unbiased information on the Web is often difficult to locate. But web services like FactCheck by the Annenberg Center try and provide information about the claims made by candidates, political organizations, and journalists themselves.
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| 2a. Give an example of a claim made in the news currently that Annenberg analyzes by visiting http://www.factcheck.org. What was the claim? In what ways was the claim false or misleading? |
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| 2b. Are you persuaded by Annenberg’s analysis? |
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| 2c. If you did not have access to a website like FactCheck, how else might you investigate the accuracy of the story?
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