The entire realm of news is undergoing major organizational shifts, whether influenced by economic changes, new digital platforms or an audience that is demographically younger and more diverse. The move online is a key reason there is a growing public distrust of news media sources (Abdulla, 2002). Free access, along with the sudden influx of bloggers and social media users, has inundated the internet with information – some more reliable and verifiable than others. The 2016 presidential election in the United States between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton highlighted a new focus of the web: fake news. This fabricated information is the latest dysfunction of distributed news, where everyone can participate and insert factual or non-factual pieces of news into the public (Steen, 2016). The lack of editorial and gatekeeping rules online are different from the common view of traditional print and broadcast news media, but many young Americans have now grown up with the internet as a central part of their lives. This generational difference results in an interesting gap in much of the current research, as there is little in terms of media research that specifically targets the college-aged demographic.
This issue of credibility in the news is closely tied to a number of other related fields to the news itself, including economics and psychology. Because the business model of news is rooted in advertising, market pressures can cause everyday citizens to view news organizations with ever-increasing skepticism (Steen, 2016). Clickbait, for example, wasn’t something many people felt passionately about until Buzzfeed perfected the art manipulating headlines for both human psychology and Search Engine Optimization. Psychologically, it can be difficult to assign traits to something or someone that the evaluator has little to no contact with. Since this research project examined perspectives across a wide range of media, there were numerous opportunities to ask for responses about unfamiliar topics. For those respondents, answers may have been offered with greater hesitation or uncertainty, bringing some unpredictability for the unknown. That unpredictability, though, is what the study was meant to capture since a respondent 's’ view of a national organization and a local one could easily vary, and the question is simply how they will differ. The key ideas of research are to see what proximal media college students are consuming and how they feel about those respective tiers of local, regional and national. Then, the survey focuses on each of those separate levels in relation to covering a local controversy – in this case, something that would occur in the UCLA community. Examples of such controversies would include the murder-suicide in an engineering building during June 2016, the apartment fire and murder investigation from October 2015 or the pipe burst that flooded campus in summer 2014. These examples, while just a handful of the types of events that could garner coverage from local, regional and national outlets, did, in fact, receive extensive coverage across all three levels of the news media. It is too ambitious to set up a research project that aims to capture college students’ general views of the media as a whole, so this specific paper holds a focus on local coverage. While I will discuss methodology in detail during the third section, the survey’s final three questions – which target the change between trustworthiness in general and trustworthiness of local issues – were designed to be analyzed most closely, thus helping limit the project’s scope. The survey was limited to current UCLA students and has its limitations in terms of reliability, too, but it offers a glimpse at a unique perspective. This perspective will become vitally important to understand more and more because the vast majority of Millennials will soon be …show more content…
The article, entitled “Public Trust or Mistrust? Perceptions of Media Credibility in the Information Age” finds that people are largely skeptical of news no matter where it comes from (Kiousis, 2001). Respondents did, however, give newspapers the highest credibility scores – ranking them above the web and television. In relation to my study, there is no longer a big distinction between newspapers and the internet since every major news site that was once a physical paper also has a strong web presence. Credibility rankings nowadays would take both platforms into
This issue of credibility in the news is closely tied to a number of other related fields to the news itself, including economics and psychology. Because the business model of news is rooted in advertising, market pressures can cause everyday citizens to view news organizations with ever-increasing skepticism (Steen, 2016). Clickbait, for example, wasn’t something many people felt passionately about until Buzzfeed perfected the art manipulating headlines for both human psychology and Search Engine Optimization. Psychologically, it can be difficult to assign traits to something or someone that the evaluator has little to no contact with. Since this research project examined perspectives across a wide range of media, there were numerous opportunities to ask for responses about unfamiliar topics. For those respondents, answers may have been offered with greater hesitation or uncertainty, bringing some unpredictability for the unknown. That unpredictability, though, is what the study was meant to capture since a respondent 's’ view of a national organization and a local one could easily vary, and the question is simply how they will differ. The key ideas of research are to see what proximal media college students are consuming and how they feel about those respective tiers of local, regional and national. Then, the survey focuses on each of those separate levels in relation to covering a local controversy – in this case, something that would occur in the UCLA community. Examples of such controversies would include the murder-suicide in an engineering building during June 2016, the apartment fire and murder investigation from October 2015 or the pipe burst that flooded campus in summer 2014. These examples, while just a handful of the types of events that could garner coverage from local, regional and national outlets, did, in fact, receive extensive coverage across all three levels of the news media. It is too ambitious to set up a research project that aims to capture college students’ general views of the media as a whole, so this specific paper holds a focus on local coverage. While I will discuss methodology in detail during the third section, the survey’s final three questions – which target the change between trustworthiness in general and trustworthiness of local issues – were designed to be analyzed most closely, thus helping limit the project’s scope. The survey was limited to current UCLA students and has its limitations in terms of reliability, too, but it offers a glimpse at a unique perspective. This perspective will become vitally important to understand more and more because the vast majority of Millennials will soon be …show more content…
The article, entitled “Public Trust or Mistrust? Perceptions of Media Credibility in the Information Age” finds that people are largely skeptical of news no matter where it comes from (Kiousis, 2001). Respondents did, however, give newspapers the highest credibility scores – ranking them above the web and television. In relation to my study, there is no longer a big distinction between newspapers and the internet since every major news site that was once a physical paper also has a strong web presence. Credibility rankings nowadays would take both platforms into