What we don't know won't hurt us: the media's decision

What we know and what we don't know has always been for the media to decide, but not for long with the new popularity of citizen journalism and the internet. The public has always had to rely on the truthfulness of the journalist, their editor, and their newspaper's owner to deliver us the real story.

It's well known that we do not always receive the real story.

It seems that this is all behind us now, with the many citizen journalists on the internet having no restrictions to tell us the full story within minutes of it happening, before the media can even decide what angle they want, what spin to put on it, and what to conceal from the public.

As you can probably guess, there may also be a problem here: how do we know what we are hearing from these amateur sources is even right? Well we don't, but having them has increased the democracy within Australia, and it may even give the traditional media sources something to think about. If we as the public are hearing the full story anyway via the internet, they may as well publish the full story as well.

Source: Oehms, LR, The ugly truth about blatant media bias, The Australian, 25 August.

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