The Reliability of Mass Media. The internet technology and mass media

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The Reliability of Mass Media
Introduction
Mass media is any channel of communication that is used to pass across information to many people simultaneously, and it includes radio, newspapers, television, billboards, magazines, films, books, recordings, and of late the internet. The question of reliability and credibility of the information which passes through such media raises many questions based on the source or means of acquiring the information sought (Wimmer & Dominick, P. 2). Content analysis is a critical element in the assessment of the validity of the information being propagated to the masses, and as such, it calls for keenness to ascertain the message’s dependability. This paper seeks to explore more on the reliability of the mass media since; media is a powerful tool to the masses because the mass relies on any update brought forth by the media about the events taking place within or outside their environment. In the same breath, the analysis involves the conventional press and the internet and how the information is received and processed.
In all human social activities, matters of trust have taken center stage. It is for this reason that trust plays an instrumental role at both societal and interpersonal level. In the recent past, there has been a lack of trust in many public institutions, the media, and politics. The failure of the traditional monetary model of the news media has brought about reducing returns and redundancies. It is because of this that some of the most established enterprises in the journalism industry have lost big because of restructuring. Moreover, these upheavals have also led to an existential crisis in the field of journalism as the professionals work tirelessly to outdo the boundaries created between them, bloggers, citizens and the role of other communications (Fisher, P. 3).
The tsunami effect from the global trends has also been a significant impediment in the credibility of the news items presented by the journalists. This means that there is plenty of information which is exposed to the public, which in the end becomes hard to distinguish the credible from the less credible information. There have been reports on poor reporting skills and standards that have led to a decline in the level of trust. In the same breath, there have been reports of high profile plagiarism, distortion and daily inaccuracies that have undermined the reliability and credibility of journalism to the public (Fisher, P. 3). It is with this mind that there have been frantic efforts to push pressure on the journalism practitioners, to boost their transparency, by revealing their editorial decision making to the public, because of increasing the necessary trust (Fisher 3).
According to recent research findings, matters of trust can be divided into three common areas. Firstly, the credibility of the message – or the trust in the information; secondly, credibility of the source or the kind of trust which entrusted in the provider of the information and finally, the credibility of the media which is also referred to as the credibility of the channel or medium for transmission. The biggest challenge in all these is that there...