Media Should Be A Healthy Form of Freedom of Expression

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.