{"id":14416,"date":"2016-11-21T11:02:40","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T16:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/?p=14416"},"modified":"2017-06-26T11:41:37","modified_gmt":"2017-06-26T16:41:37","slug":"in-life-and-liberty-the-media-facebook-and-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/tartan-news\/2016\/11\/21\/in-life-and-liberty-the-media-facebook-and-donald-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"In Life and Liberty: The media, Facebook and Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

After the dust settled on Donald Trump\u2019s election, questions still remained in the media. The mainstream media was faced with a problem it had never seen before in this election. They were faced with two candidates that were less than ideal and, instead of using its power to confront the problem and become a voice of truth and reason, they instead repeated what they have always done. They played the moderator; the people who skate a line between Democrat and Republican. It didn\u2019t work this time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The media failed to see the angst and anger that had built up over the past two years and exploded in the form of Trump and Clinton. They failed to take Trump seriously as a candidate, and as a result, poorly vetted him. They failed to see the anger over the economic divide, the rural-urban divide and the shortcomings of Hillary Clinton. The media missed the mark.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a student journalist, that\u2019s painful to say. I am often known to defend the rights of the media and to also defend the job they do, but the election cycle took them aback.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, journalism didn\u2019t fail the whole time this year. As one journalist from the Arizona Republic stated, \u201cWe\u2019ve seen great reporting. We\u2019ve seen lousy reporting.\u201d The American public as a whole misses the really great reporting. To name a few, Brian Stelter of CNN did a great job, as did Sopan Deb of CBS, Jenna Johnson of The Washington Post and David Farenthold also of The Washington Post.<\/span><\/p>\n

The media cannot be clumped into one group for all of us to claim as wrong and biased. Some reporters really did do a wonderful job of reporting, but the majority of the media didn\u2019t do what they were supposed to. They didn\u2019t give a voice to the people who were trying to speak out. They didn\u2019t try to understand that anger and so when the media told people they were wrong, no one listened.<\/span><\/p>\n

The really good reporters covered the campaigns tirelessly and tweeted constantly. That, of course, brings me to my next point. Facebook.<\/span><\/p>\n

Facebook has been getting a lot of heat recently for influencing the election with their \u201cnews,\u201d a lot of which was fake. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, has denied any influence in the election and that 99 percent of the news stories were true. That may very well be the case, but one percent of the stories get shared thousands of times.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my honest opinion, Twitter is a great place to get that news, but if you are that Facebook person, please remember that Facebook news is like Wikipedia, a lot of false things can get put on there without anyone catching it. So, just like The Onion, take your Facebook news with a grain of salt from here on out.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the end of the day, the election results can\u2019t be blamed on the media or on Facebook. The media didn\u2019t always handle everything well and they have a long road to recovery after this. Facebook will need to seriously evaluate their news and what makes it through to readers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Everyone will need to pick themselves back up and recover after this election. I don\u2019t know if the divide will ever get better. In fact, it may just get worse. However, I ask people to let the media recover and then look for some good reporters who will give some real news. I wouldn\u2019t count on Fox News and MSNBC to be your sources of unbiased journalism. And stay wary of Facebook of providing you anything other than an update on your Grandma.<\/span><\/p>\n

America has a long way to go to heal the divide that has been created. We all have our own part to play in it and the media has to do theirs. The next four years will be telling as to where we all end up.<\/span><\/p>\n

Laina Yost<\/strong>
\nManaging Editor<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the dust settled on Donald Trump\u2019s election, questions still remained in the media. The mainstream media was faced with a problem it had never seen before in this election. They were faced with two candidates that were less than ideal and, instead of using its power to confront the problem and become a voice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10290,"featured_media":13698,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[1604,1625,1428,446,2005,1043,1384,1626],"class_list":["post-14416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tartan-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-facebook","tag-in-life-and-liberty","tag-journalism","tag-laina-yost","tag-media","tag-opinion","tag-social-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Laina-Website.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-3Kw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14416"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15685,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14416\/revisions\/15685"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}