Fake News

As the world is struggling to meet vaccine demands, deal with reported side effects, and verify proposed drugs that could cure coronavirus infections, the media is full of fake news recently. The misinformation was so great that it masquerades as truth and shamelessly gets away with it.

What makes this propagation of fake news even more fascinating is the way it was vaguely presented which mimics the truth, so that the media becomes an important conduit on how it was narrated, and therefore culturally accepted by the many, as a way for propaganda to work on its own well-oiled mechanism.

It is to be construed that the media plays a central role in culturally relevant ways of presenting the facts. The news is often taken as Gospel truth by some people, and this remains as the journalist's responsibility in preserving the integrity of his or her piece of writing.

We can understand that the media adheres to ethical standards of their own, but what makes misinformation nowadays even more fatal is the advent of social media. Anyone can now just post something online, get the likes and the shares it needed to gain attention, and then propagate fake news without knowing it, good faith or no.

Our responsibility transcends into just watching the drama unfold. A dangerous world, with all the propaganda and self-interest it peddles to the public, is a rich source of twisted facts that is open to sensationalism. We might be watching a conspiracy behind the scenes right now, and we don't even aware of it yet.

The next time we open our social media accounts, we have to remember not to take everything at face value. Even media companies take advertisements from businesses, and this billion dollar industry protects its own thing for survival and positive, growing bottom figures that are one of the management's concern. The news, understood in this light, must be taken with a grain of salt.

Our responsibility as information consumer is to question more.

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