For blog post #4, I found some future challenges for journalists as the world and media world changes. The ethical issue is how the updated media has made it hard for political news to be believed. More specifically, with fake news and the 24-hour news cycle. With news cycling on a constant loop, reporters are put in a difficult position regarding fact checking. According to common reporter rules, your sources should be double checked and verified before publishing the information given. With news cycling so fast, news reporters don’t always fact check in hopes to get their news out first and be the breaking story.
In political news, news stations tend to align themselves with one political area or the other. Fox for example, is a conservative network. The issue with news stations aligning themselves is that news stations are supposed to serve as unbiased and informing the public. However, they take a biased stance on politics when they show and align with one side or the other. Therefore, information published by that source would be hard to believe. Fake news is essentially the same with fact checking. The news stations are publishing what they hear and taking it as word, without checking properly. In the book assigned for class, they mention how fack checking on reporting can’t be something that is bypassed because of the potential backlash you are leaving open for when they article is released.
A con of this is that the public could be receiving false accounts of news and further spreading it. Let’s say you only watch Fox, but you didn’t know about their political alignments. You watch Fox for news updates, but you will only hear the sides that make the conservative party look good, a bias reporting. This is a huge downside in the correct way of reporting ethically. For a pro, if people know of the bias in a news station, they can boycott that station and spread the truth. To form a solution, news stations should be help to a higher account when it comes to their fact checking and reporting on biased news.
Challenges of Reporting on Politics 