Donald Trump is right.
That hurt down deep to say. But it is true, just not in the way he realizes.
I am a Mass Communications major here at our university. I have taken my fair share of journalism classes, like Media Writing and classes covering media bias. And the only thing that my teachers stress the most is that if you are a reporter, your job is to report the news, nothing more, same if you were a newspaper writer, television reporter, or a radio personality. You do not put your own personal opinions into what you say over any type of broadcasting, written or verbal, if you are giving facts from a news story. So keep that in mind as I continue.
We live in a society where we get so much information from different places all the time that we often lead to an information overload. We can instantly know what is happening anywhere in the world just by looking it up on the internet through our phones. Within that overload of information sharing, we often forget to check or back up sources before we share it ourselves. We need to start trusting reliable news sources, but how can we tell which ones are? Thankfully, we can always count our our local and international news stations to deliver us trusting news, or can we? While Trump calls out news sources like CNN or NBC for being as he calls it ‘fake news’, he never claims why they are labeled as fake news in the beginning, only that they print untruthful things about him personally. But never mind, that could be an article in itself. The real news source we need to be looking more closely at is Fox News. If you may recall, the United States had a terrible mass shooting in Las Vegas recently. Most news sources were respectfully giving the details of the situation as they were informed of it on their end. Fox News however had reporters on one segment that were claiming that the reason he shot many people was because the shooter didn’t have God in his life.
While I am a Mass Comm major, I am also an Atheist. So you can see how I was deeply offended by the fact they were broadcasting it to the world their own opinions about the situation, which is something I have learned in my classes to NEVER do. They made horrible accusations about my religion (or lack there of) and suggested their own opinion that the shooter shot those people because of his lack of religion and how it may have been the country music that was played that put him over the edge.
Now, I would like to admit that I grew up on country music, and even though many country artists do mention God in their music, it doesn’t make me love it any less. Many atheists and other non-believers truly don’t care what other people think of religion- we personally just don’t believe in it. We would never try to turn someone to see the light of atheism because that’s just not who we are and we aren’t those types of people.
So that begs the question: Why did they say this? Simply because they didn’t have anything else to hold him to. The man responsible for the Las Vegas shooting was a rich, white man with no history of mental illness, only that he didn’t believe in God. That was the only thing Fox News could come up with as a way to blame the disaster on.
This is outrageous. You can’t make a claim without backing it up with supporting data, and they were basing it solely off their beliefs, which is not how journalism works. Much like writing a research paper, you have to have sufficient evidence, sources, and data to back up your claims. If you want your audience to prove you know what you speak of, you need to have the evidence backing you up. So I will not continue to believe what Fox News says until they bring forward the proof of their claims and opinions. Until then, Fox News is nothing more than #Fake News to me.