In my resent post, I wrote about whether the Internet was killing the media or not. After more consideration I thought to myself that even if the Internet does not kill the media it could in some sense affect the quality of news coverage.
In my years of surfing the Internet for news, I have come across many news stories that are either simply wrong or lacking minimum quality of sources. Many of the big media companies, like the Guardian or the Times, have been guilty of covering what is called urban legends, or stories that have been around the world - often for many years - but no truth lies behind them.
One of those urban legends is a story about a woman that got stuck to a toilet whilst on an airplane. This story has popped up again and again on news sites but it always changes a little bit, for example the woman’s ethnicity and the type of transport. (For more information you can click on this link: http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/toilet.asp)
The Internet has made it a lot easier for urban legends to become a “reality” and when the media companies feature them they seldom admit their mistakes for the reader later. Maybe these kinds of news are published online because there is not a strong editing policy? It seems to me that some of the news stories online are written with impatience and time pressure.
Even though I wonder about these aspects of the news media, I cannot argue against news coverage online. It might, in my opinion, be necessary for some media companies to reconsider their online news policies. It would in some cases make the news coverage better and more reliable for the readers.
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