▶ Your Answer :
These days, the news media is considered to be the rich source of information where most of the people are heavily relying on without special doubt about its impartiality. Even though the existence of the news media itself seeks for providing people with the just and unbiased information on various aspects of our society, it cannot act as a completely impartial source of information for many reasons. The contents of the news media cannot be perfectly neutral, since the person who writes the articles and organizes the contents of the media tends to hold their own personal stance, and commercial purposes are likely to work behind the media contents in many occasions.
Firstly, it is inevitable that individual perspective is reflected in the articles and contents one is supposed to write in any way. Even when two reporters are required to write about the same topic, they would write out completely different two articles based on their own viewpoints as well as their particular field of interest concerned with the given topic. In order to illustrate this point, there were two articles with the same item which could be broadly categorized into the same topic – welfare. Since the two reporters who wrote the articles held radically different views towards social phenomenon and what shape our society ought to take on, the content, direction, suggestion and the arguments were posited on the two different extremes. One argued that welfare should be cut down since it hampers free competition, and another claimed that welfare should be expanded in order to guarantee the minimum quality of life of the members of this society.
Another point I would like to make is that business and commercial purposes are bound to be included in the news media, which makes us seriously doubt the reliability of its contents. If commercial aims are included in the articles, it eludes the public’s judicious understandings towards social events and seriously misleads people. There are many advertisements on the newspaper, taking on formats of either the explicit commercials or the implicit ones which are disguised to be the normal article but its real intention is to advertise something. For example, there was an article which shows the positive aspects of a certain type of food. People were attracted by the contents and the huge boom emerged to buy this type of food and enhance their health as well as physical attractiveness – the effects they can get if they eat this food, according tho the article content. However, it has turned out later that the contents were fabricated by the company owners who wanted to sell their food, and the reporters wrote that article with commercial repayment from them. Just like this incident shows us, information on the news media can be hugely selective, which means that it does not shows every single aspect and truth that they ought to be. They sometimes deliberately omit the negative impact something will bring about, and further, they can fabricate and lie about a certain product in seeking for material wants.
In conclusion, the news media is not completely independent from commercialism, as well as the personal perspectives of who organize the contents and direction. Thus, it is very likely to be distorted and biased, and people need to judiciously judge whether the contents in the news media can be believed or not with their keen eyes and senses towards diverse perspectives as well as the economic way the world is moving along.
|