PRESS’S STALKERS

Press’s Stalkers Are Using Social Media as Minefields

Enrique Castejon-Lara

November, 2019

Abstract

Press has been, for centuries, stalked by powerful people, especially those from governments because of its perseverant work of disclosing truth. Through time, stalking methods have been changing, according with the appearing of circumstances that make press more exposed or vulnerable, like nowadays with the social media information mess.

Mass Media, historically, have been a consistent annoyance for powerful people that do not want citizens know truth about their corrupt or ineffective activities. For that reason, they always try to constrain press to avoid the disclosure of relevant facts against them (self-censorship), and the best strategy is taking advantage of any news mistake to discredit it before citizens. In effect, those new individual’s communication resources on Internet are a perfect terrain for that target, because their messing flow of true and fake news represents a great opportunity to set up traps for press.

In that sense, mass media have to be prudent enough to avoid a lot of baits on Internet as a part of a conspiracy of powerful persons (Castejon-Lara, 2019).

That is the reason why the phenomenon of fake news has gained so much importance. Many people, universities and research institutions have been studying it. We can find a large number of essays, articles and academic works oriented to this topic. But, many of them —like it happened in the sixties of the last century— with a clear ideological inclination to left. When reviewing recent references about social media manipulated content, it is easy observed how some of them are produced by authors with this political orientation seeking make responsible “radical sectors of the right and center” of all social networks evils and not to propagandists or professional manipulators; who, by the way, are many times from the left.

In the book “Social Media Conspiracy” (Kindle Direct Publishing, 2019),  I describe those aspects that, intentionally or not, are affecting the usual work of press and that, in some cases, reveal the purpose of certain actors of the political, economic and social establishment to discredit and depreciate the work of the mass media. From that perspective, fake news is emerging not only as an occasional and spontaneous phenomenon of contemporary communication, but also as a conspiracy against press and journalism, in spite of they have done so much, throughout history, to inform timely and truthfully to the most diverse audiences.

References:

Castejón-Lara, Enrique. Social Media Conspiracy. Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon, USA, November 2019.

Symbiosis Between Newspapers and Social Media

Newspapers and Social Media Create

a Big Symbiosis Instead Rivalry

Enrique Castejon-Lara*

Abstract:

Social media have been increasing their relevance in contemporary society, including as an emerging abundant news source. For that reason, newspapers cannot ignore them. However, they have to carefully watch de information flows from them to evade risk of using fake facts in their reports.

In the last decade, the habitual news stream has been changing in the world because of the appearance of social media. For that circumstance, many mass communication specialists have declared that the existence of newspapers is in risk.

However, today that change in the mass communication world is evidencing a very different situation. Social media are not replacing newspapers nor these ones are affecting social media. On the contrary, both communication systems have been complementing each other. Right now, it is occurring a symbiotic process between both current information systems —journalism and people on-line media.

Certainly, journalism has found in social media a new and explosive news source; but in a very raw manner. For that reason, it has realized that the information richness of those media includes also huge jeopardies, because in the social media news’ torrent comes indiscriminately some true facts and a lot of fake data.

In short, increasing relevance in contemporary society of those new information resources cannot be ignore by newspapers —but they have the ethical obligation of checking the facts that social media ‘reveal’ (Castejon-Lara, 2015); because, on the flow content of those means, there are many messages with different intentions and journalists have to revise them in order to inform honestly to audiences.

Popularity of social media, finally, is a real temptation for news manipulators, propagandists, and unscrupulous public relation specialists. So that, reporters have the obligation of checking those aspects taken from social media before processing news. Actually, audiences are expecting just that —that journalists, after processing news, offer a trust version of that they previously read on social media.

Reference:

CASTEJON-LARA, Enrique. Interpretative Reporting, CreativeSpace (Amazon), 2015

*Tenure professor for Central University of Venezuela, UCV (Spanish acronym).