Before social media, the way that we get news are only
from TV, radio or newspaper. In this way, people are receiver because they
didn’t transmit the news. With the development of social media, we got more
approach to find news and information. Everyone become the transmitter and
receiver. We can make news by posting online. So here is the question, dose
social media has increased the quality of news and information or decreased it?
At the beginning, I thought social media decrease the
quality of news because too many people make junk online and make fake news and
it is hard for us to find the truth. However, when I think about the news of
this girl in China, I realized that actually social media do improve the
quality of the news.
In 2011, Chinese girl Meimei Guo is connected with the
Red Cross Society of China. She claimed on her Weibo(Chinese Twitter) that she
is the "commercial general manager" of the Red Cross Society of
China. This was a false claim. The money she raised from donations were used to
buy luxury cars and designer handbags (Li 1.). Because of this happened, the
Red Cross of China and the whole Chinese charity system now facing a
credibility crisis. This news shocked the whole country and money in China does
not trust charity organization anymore. This woman in our country would be
referred to as a concubine.
Imaging if there are no Weibo, people won't know there
is a girl who use the money supposed for charity to improve her luxury life. If
she didn't show off that she is the "commercial general manager" of
the Red Cross Society of China, we won’t know that there is a huge problem in
the management of the Red Cross Society.
Three years later, Guo was arrested for illegal
betting on the World Cup. The interesting thing is the evidence of this crime
was her post on Weibo that she bet Brazil will win and she said she spent a lot
of money on this wager.
Because of social media, we really dig huge news and
it won't find out without social media because too many things happened every
day. However, it is true that there a lot of worthless news on social media,
but as long as we try to select the true news, we will get the benefit from
that. Also even before social media, we can't trust the news from traditional
media either, so we can’t say that social media made the quality of news become
bad.
About how news and information are being disseminated
in countries with closed or restrictive governments, I have a lot of experience
base on my home country of China. In China, we don't have a lot of freedom of
media, such as we don't have Facebook, YouTube even Google, so basically
government control media. For instance, China Central Television (CCTV), is the
predominant state television broadcaster in mainland China. CCTV has a network
of 45 channels broadcasting different programs and is accessible to more than
one billion viewers. CCTV produces its own news broadcasts three times a day
and is the country’s most powerful and prolific television program producer.
Xinwen Lianbo ("CCTV Network News"), goes on the air daily at 7:00 pm
Beijing time. All local stations have an obligation to carry CCTV's news
broadcast. An internal CCTV survey indicates that nearly 500 million people
countrywide regularly watch this program.The activities of the President of
the People's Republic of China are almost always the first item, then will have
some news about the political meeting, in the end will be worldwide news. The
people in the news are always happy and it seems other countries always have
accidents. There are a lot of news were hide so basically I got news from
internet, such as Weibo. It is so sad to realize that there are a lot of fake
useless news on TV until I go to Canada.
It is true that more and more pop culture, celebrities
news instead of investigative reporting on important topics, however, consider
the age population on the internet, most of people are around 20 to 30 years
old and people more interesting on the news are not really profound. Overall, with
time goes by, more and more investigative reporting on important topics will
come out and social media will be more important in our life.
Reference:
l CCTV. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Central_Television
l Li, Raymond. How can Red Cross Society of China regain public
trust?. South China Morning Post, 25 Apr. 2013.web. 16 Sep 2013.
l Xinwenlianbo. Wikipedia.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinwen_Lianbo
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