Synthesis and Reflection blog post

Media Law

What was a new concept? How will you think about it differently as a journalist?

When we were introduced to all of the new topics and concepts I was very intrigued by one specifically which is the Shield Law. The Shield Law is "a law that protects witnesses from revealing certain information, especially in court .This law protects journalist from having to reveal confidential sources and protects rape victims from having to reveal details of their sexual history." This can occur when you are interviewing someone and they need to be anonymous for a certain reason. This could be because saying a certain thing during the interview could possibly hurt their reputation or bring them some sort of physical, emotional, or mental harm. I find this very interesting because even if it is very important to know this certain person you can not expose them in any way. And if you do break this law then you could have severe consequences such as being put in jail. 

But there are worries of having anonymous sources:

1. Is it trust worthy?
2. Is it quoting an anonymous source that knows what they are talking about?
3. Are they just made up?

There are many worries with having an anonymous source that I have now relied through taking this class. I now know what to think about anonymous sources and how to use them if need be.

Fake News

What was a new concept? How will you think about it differently as a journalist?

Taking journalism has been very eye opening to me. From the movie Shattered Glass, to writing a simple article. I have learned so much about the lies the media have told us, how they get away with it, and how they cover up their tracks. But one of the main concepts that have really stood out to me is precision. Precision is a way to tell how an article on the internet or written is fake. This is by gathering data such as names of places and people in the article and doing a "fact check". Fact checking is a significant part in proving an article is partially fake or totally made up. An example of this is the movie "Shattered Glass". Since we have all seen this movie I don't think that I need to explain that all of Stephen Glass's articles were fake. And the reason how people found out that this was false was because, yup, you guessed it, by fact checking... 

Although fact checking is not the easiest thing to do, it can make journalists that write the article think twice about doing it again. The best part about it is that anyone can do it. You don't need to be a specialist to be able to go on websites and make a few phone calls, you just need to be passionate enough and willing patient enough to be able to do it. 

There are multiple reasons why journalists waste their time to make fake articles or add to them. But the major push factor is the money that they get out of it. When they publish this "news",they cause major commotion. And it has been proven before that the fake news spreads faster then real and factual news. 

Through searching and writing I can tell what is really news and whats not... Can you?