Wall Street's motto greed is good challenges media's purpose

Carol Forsloff - If
you have a little money and 15 social media friends willing to Facebook
and Twitter for you or have a strong political agenda and know people
with bucks, you can post news, but how does that aid its real purpose?

There
is a march to get in line to write news, now that it has been found
that most Americans get much of their news from the Internet.  Some of
this "news" is in the form of email messages with snippets of
information that give no author and no source and yet are quoted
regularly.  Some are videos pasted on Facebook.  But that's not the
biggest dilemma we face.

There
are corporate backers with mighty bucks to back sites
over the  Internet.  They have the money to pay for agenda writing, far
more than places where traditionally trained journalists often post
news.  That's one form of media driven by Wall Street ways on the web.
Yet there are those designed to empower citizens by mocking or copying
traditional news sources, by design, in order to secure attention and
control all at the same time.

These
days anyone can write the news, so citizen sites announce.  But what
does that do for the fourth estate, the organism originally empowered to
inform, educate and really hold power to account when just anyone with a
computer or corporate financial backing can control what you read and
observe?

The
news you get may not be the news you need, want or ought to have, given
the sources available, some with the incredible and some lacking
credibility at all.  While folks condemn the traditional media, a whole
new wing, much of it to the right, has sprung up to write "the news,"
some under the banner of Jesus and some under the banner of right-wing
persuasion or both.

There
is also citizen journalism, originally designed to supplement
information from "on the ground" sources, which strives these days to
compete with traditional news sources.  Some of these "journalists,"
referred to as "citizen reporters" or "digital journalists" often have
no journalism training at all and could have been your plumber yesterday
or even your babysitter tomorrow.  On some citizen sites, it is
possible to write news that is presented in an attractive format by
someone who has never investigated directly most of the material
written.  It is also often presented by those without background in the
topic being written about, whether that's history, science, politics,
social sciences or even local information from the geographic area
itself.

All
of this adds up to the corporate design becoming the engine of media
news, not just television and traditional sources, but also the World
Wide Web.  These organizations have sufficient time, assets or both to
form a mighty bulwark of opposition to journalists who try to report the
news in unbiased, unvarnished ways.  Traditional journalists who join
are driven out, either through opposition to copied news or methods of
business promotion.  Popularity with voting mechanisms as opposed to
quality drives what is read and what is not.

While
the state of the media shows citizen journalism growing, the concept of
posting material over which there is limited editorial input or control
remains a question not just of traditional but citizen journalists as
well.

Some
say the way to reduce the problem is for readers to avoid blogs
entirely.  Yet in the present growth of the media, traditional
journalists turn more and more to blogs to write the news, because of
the ease of posting, while many bloggers continue to write mostly
opinion.  So it's not the form of delivery, but who delivers the
message, that makes the difference these days.

Traditional
news sites, on the other hand, respond to citizen journalism and the
public's interest in direct involvement by comment sections that
sometimes take over the site.  These too are directed towards the
popular and the mundane as opposed to serious information and ideas,
because the notion of control, of power and of greed controls the game.

So
what are the consequences in the Wall Street world of the web?  The
public is left with confusion and less trust in the information
produced.  Without safeguards, the media has moved away from
information, education and holding power to account.  It is now a puzzle
to sort through, a mass of mistakes and agendas people have to sort to
find what they need for sound living and to make good decisions in a

free society.