Have you ever thought that all of the news you have seen on TV might not be true? If the answer is yes, you might not be completely wrong. TV news is so many people’s main source of information about the agenda. Therefore, they must be the reliable source everyone has an access to. Nonetheless, we cannot say that they are fully objective and non-influenced by some other factors. These factors contain media’s own agenda too.
TV news is the most easily-accessible source of the media. The reason for that is the undeniable accessibility of the television, almost every house has one inside it. Nonetheless, the rise of the social media decreased the amount of people who watches news constantly. Learning every detail about an incident just by pressing a few buttons a lot easier than waiting for the news to mention it. Thus, a fair amount of people stopped watching the news on TV which caused a loss of money for the TV channels. In addition, with social media, the people have the chance to say their own opinion about the news and debate about their opinion with other people. This chance of interaction increased the rate of the social media’s users, more and more people stopped watching news. Moreover, people are more likely to follow and watch the news sources which share the similar perspective with them. All of these things led the TV news being influenced by media. They started to say the similar things with media and started following the popular opinions that people share to attract more people to watch them. There is a way to understand if the news is influenced by the media or not. The most important part about this is understanding if the news is telling the facts or just opinions. These two concept can be confusing to distinguish at some debatable situations but an easy way to do it is distinguishing the information with a source from the interpreted one. As a simple example, suppose that there was a news about poor people who have committed robbery and failed. This is a crime according to the law, this is a fact; but defending the justification of this robbery because the people who have committed it is poor is an opinion, you cannot prove that this is right because there is no literal source other than our pity.
In conclusion, with the rise of social media, the TV news stopped trying to give the true news and focused on getting more attention. This caused the reliability of the TV news to decrease. To avoid the misinformation that got spread by this news, we should be able to distinguish the opinions from the facts.