THE FAKE NEWS DEBATE.

      

Photo credit: The Huffington post

Fake News.This has become the most controversial topic in debates recently and has left many people worried, clueless and confused on what to believe and what not to read as news.The traditional media vs the era of digital technology (social media), has made a twist of how people perceive factual news and the public interest right.Since the birth of democracy, the press has been left independent thus playing its greatest role in agenda setting and seeking public's opinion,views on democratic issue.
For long the society has been left to be manipulated by the media which has been the only platform of massive dissemination of information thus making it as the most reliable source.

The united states President Donald Trump is one of those big personalities who has faced the wrath of negative hate from the press.He has been been attacking the big  names in the media industry such like CNN, BBC, Aljazeera among others.Mud has been thrown on them as producers of fake news.Trump has been crying out loud that the media hates him so much and they didn't believe he won the elections.Hillary Clinton was always put on the lead  by opinion poll from the media thus this made Trump to be more angry with the media.

Away from this, social media has also become another parasite of fake news.Articles on blogs harming other people's lives mostly celebrities in the name of public interest in order to get blog traffic(views, ratings and Ads).Facebook and Twitter is also mentioned as the biggest platforms of spreading unfactual stories with no reliable sources.Users has been left in this mass mess since they access the news without fact checking, proofing  whether its real or not.Social media has left users to consume all  this because their are no serious regulatory measures kept in place to protect consumers rather victims of bad stories.This is degrading the role of media in agenda setting because the society will never get the truth about issues.

Does it mean, if you dont like the news then thats fake news?  this is also another task that should  be tackled with care because we might be attacking the press for wrong reasons.I understand as a human, if a certain press decides to give a negative story about me i will quickly find ways to attack or find other means of getting away with it.Simply will react and give it a grey name (fake story). This brings us to another way of looking at this matter in another angle.Negative stories about someone is not fake as long as it has passed the right process of fact checking and sourcing the story.The media can easily get away with this since they have high expertise journalista who will always provide a well designed story and pass through editors before it gets to the public.With social media anyone can write a story and spread through spams or hastags making it the topic of discussion without passing any proof checking.

Damages have been done and its time to recover from this biasness and malicious ways of writing stories.All stake holders (Media owners, website and social media users and government) should come together and find a common ground and put stringent measures  to solve and guide the spread of malicious stories. Journalists should ensure that a story  no matter how controversial it is, it should be checked and get verified sources before publishing. Because  fake news can propagate war or cause unwanted harm to other people.The key thing is to VERIFY the news.