Op-Ed: Finding the Truth in News is Up to You

Finding accurate and trustworthy news is more important than ever in the face of misinformation.

By: Hilary Van Hoose, Copy Editor

Photo Illustration by Astrid Cortez

According to recent Gallup polls, only about 12 percent of Americans have confidence in television news, 18 percent have confidence in newspapers, and 16 percent have confidence in news on the internet. Where did it all go wrong?

During a recent interview with businessman Steve Ballmer on The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart asked “Why do we fight so hard against the government being a proper check on [corporate power], against that exploitation?”

In order to understand why, and how, it’s necessary to know a little bit of history.

Almost a century ago, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927 as a temporary stop-gap solution and tasked the Federal Radio Commission to provide regulation for burgeoning new forms of broadcast communication that had never existed before.

Seven years later, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Communications Act of 1934 “established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent U.S. agency responsible for the regulation of interstate and foreign communications by radio, television, wire, and, later, satellite.”

These regulations remained largely unaltered until Ronald Reagan’s FCC Chairman Mark Fowler pushed the regulatory body to favor an approach resembling laissez-faire capitalism in the 1980s.

PBS journalist Bill Moyers noted in an episode of the show Moyers & Company that while 50 corporations controlled the majority of U.S. media in 1983, media consolidation shrank that number to 23 corporations by 1990, only 10 corporations by 1997, and a mere 6 corporations by 2012.

In the middle of this new era, one of the biggest blows to fairness in media came in the form of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Among other things, the legislation massively accelerated the creation of a media oligopoly not only by drastically increasing the number of newspapers and television stations a single corporation was allowed to own in a given location, but also by raising the percentage of the national audience that a given corporation could have access to.

Fewer sources of news with greater control over what messages people get to hear made for less competition and less accountability, and likely resulted in the lack of trust we are seeing today that pushed people to look to other sources of information, like social media.

An analysis by Pew Research Center shows that 39 percent of adults under 30 regularly get their news on TikTok, with another fact sheet by Pew showing that 54 percent of U.S. adults “at least sometimes” get news from social media.

So, given the increasing lack of net neutrality and consolidation of corporate control over social media, have online news and social media made the situation better or worse? In some ways, both.

On the one hand, each social media platform is a corporation that is subject to few regulations compared with what we commonly consider traditional media, and false claims of government interference have resulted in Supreme Court cases such as Murthy v. Missouri, which found that social media companies have been allowed to run wildly unchecked and that any claims to the contrary are spurious.

As a matter of fact, a study published in Bulletin of the World Health Organization found that up to 29 percent of all social media posts about COVID-19 during the first phase of the pandemic contained misinformation that likely caused incalculable harm.

On the other hand, social media practices were exposed to public scrutiny when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before a 2018 joint hearing of two Senate committees, on how a Russian propagandist group used Facebook to sway the 2016 elections and how Facebook profited when data firm Cambridge Analytica received unauthorized access to the private data of about 87 million Facebook users.

If every type of media is rife with bias and misinformation, what can college students do to stay informed? Take classes that teach you necessary skills for the modern age, like critical thinking, reading comprehension, research, and media literacy.