Remember that time when we used to wait for that sound of the newspaper being thrown at our doors by the newspaper guy? It used to be me or Dada anxiously waiting.
24×7 news channels weren’t there back then and newspapers were the thing. The timeline of reporting was longer and whatever reached us in the morning was quite certainly a clearer picture.
With the advent of News Channels, things changed and news could reach us instantly in the form of ‘Breaking news’. In this hurry to make it reach faster and claim, ‘We were the first ones to report it’, fact-checks stopped being a priority.
And then Twitter happened and news needed to be even faster.
I don’t know how many of you have watched, “The Newsroom” but there’s an interesting episode which talks exactly about this issue. To give you some context, the tv-series is a take on issues regarding news production, news and conflicts and of course journalistic ethics. This particular episode, which I mentioned, is how a news channel decides to wait before declaring the result of an election. Even when all other news channels have already reported it, they decide to wait and it turns out all others were wrong. And they were right.
A few days earlier, there was a ‘controversy’ where a reality show singer has been issued a ‘fatwa’ for not singing. Everyone was reacting to it, articles were written, facebook statuses were unleashed and what was the result? That there was no fatwa! Don’t even get me started on stupid Fatwas becoming prime time news.
Few days before, when the Gurmeher Kaur issue was the talk of the town, Minister Kiren Rijju reacted to questions from journalists. Later, he himself said that he hasn’t watched the video on which the entire controversy was based!
The Issue with dangal actress Zaira Waseem to Kanhaiya Kumar, who is the face of anti-nationals, to a long-list of ‘controversies’ which could very well be a side-column of a newspaper is the front page news. Probably because everyone needs a ‘front-page’ news item every hour!
Our FOMO instincts make us share the fake news stories circulated by Political IT Teams based on our confirmation bias.
When news channels start competing with Entertainment channels, this is bound to happen.
A lot of blame also has to fall on us, who are actively living on social media. Before writing something as a reaction straightaway, let’s try to wait for a while for the story to develop and then express our ‘valuable’ view-point. Our high-degree of FOMO needs to be controlled!