Module 2

Only a few decades ago, Americans took most of their information from traditional news media such as television news broadcasts and newspapers. People took this information at face value and didn't feel the need to audit the stories they were given. With the introduction of the internet later came the rising popularity of social media sites. These sites made it easy for anyone with internet access to share anything they like. Since there is no filter on who can share information and how factual the information must be, internet users now have to take the content they see with a grain of salt. It used to be that we knew what we knew based on what other told us, but today we must avoid clerkism, "the practice of uncritically accepting the official version of things" (Kovach, Rosenstiel 2010, p. 27). We now must search for what we know to ensure the information is correct. We must take in content, fact check with a credible source, and check those supporting facts with another source to fully ensure credibility. This falls in line with the Way of Skeptical Knowing questions listed on page thirty two of Blur (2010). These questions help validate information and demonstrate that media consumers must now transition from "trust me" to "show me" (2010, p. 33). 

Social media has grown to be a large part of the media information stream in this digital age, and lends even more to the idea of easy-to-publish content. Americans from preteen years and up are now largely and actively participating on social media sites. I use social media sites regularly for both entertainment and gathering information. From a news perspective I generally use the social media site Reddit, which is a forum style social media site where users can sort through categories of user created posts. Today on the World News section of Reddit, there was a post of a link to a New York Times article about the Presidents statements about specific N.S.A. activity. I believe the article is factual because the New York Times is known to be a credible source and is cited regularly in scholarly articles and presentations. The article also links to a live video of part of the conversation that is discussed in the article. Similar articles are also posted on several other news sites. Social media can certainly be a credible source for information, however it's important to check sources to be sure of the credibility. 

Kovach, B. & Rosenstiel, T. (2010) Blur: how to know what's true in an age of information overload. Bloomsbury USA. Print.