Media as a whole is part of our freedom to express but this right however is not absolute and if the society uses this as a tool that may be of injury to the state then this justifies why the media should be regulated.
Lawrence Sung
Nov 11I came across this chart while searching up media neutrality: It got me thinking--is there even such a thing as unbiased media? To that, I say no. Every human being grows up in a different set of circumstances and is exposed to unique stimuli that contribute to the development of a person's personality and beliefs. Over time, those solidify as one constantly uses them as a framework through which one interprets the environment around them. Thus, no matter how hard people try to be neutral when disseminating information, there will always be a slight bias towards one region of the political plane (I prefer not to use the spectrum notion since it generalizes too many political traits) because of the built-up habit of using one's belief system and personality to analyze the world.
Is this bad? Absolutely not. In fact, I think that this is great for democracy! With the notion of media neutrality gone, news agencies are free to express their own opinions about the world around them. Furthermore, the power of interpreting the media no longer is in the hands of the media themselves; rather, the democratization of media will allow the people the chance to interpret both sides of the news, for once, and will grow the public's ability to think for themselves. Thus the common people will be liberated from the vices of a monotonous press.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! How do you believe the media should be regulated? Should state governments or the federal government regulate it?
As a high school journalist, I completely agree! However, this also goes into the issue of "fake news," which the current government is promoting (instead of accurate, real news) in spite of First Amendment protections. How can this be avoided?
That's definitely an issue to be considered. It's particularly disconcerting that the government is promoting "fake news" at times. Avoiding fake news often requires one's own efforts, via understanding how to escape the echo chambers of social media feeds and how to recognize a fake news story. Do you believe that the government has a role in regulating "fake news"?
Hello, I'd love to jump in and just give my opinion - yes, I do believe that while it is the media outlet's responsibility to not broadcast fake news - to great extents it is also the government's responsibility to not propagate fake news. Moreover, politicians of opposing parties should also not use unfair means to spread propaganda against ruling parties. The media outlets should try to be as credible as possible and be responsible for publishing objective news.
That's a really great point that you make! Politicians often use the media to their advantage, which results in incredibly biased rather than objective news. With longer campaign periods, this can become a dilemma. What do you mean by unfair means?
Unfair means like influencing a media channel to project a certain political party in a better light, or by using propaganda to influence public opinion.
My only problem with that is that if we're gonna regulate things that are gonna be possibly harmful to the state, it get's hard to define what exactly is harming the state. The media's responsibility is to keep the State in check through distribution of information, and the idea that the state can stop that is scary. Now obviously if a platform is distributing hate speech or if they're encouraging violence or even if they're putting out straight up lies, then there definitely should be a way to fight that, but outside of that it gets blurry. I'm not super anti-government, but checks and balances need to exist.
There definitely needs to be checks and balances regarding this, but in my opinion, regulating speech is often a slippery slope, even with hate speech.