Consumption — A Piece on News
Dr. Andrew Selepak, a University professor in the Journalism school, told me one thing that shook the way I consume media. Understand this, and your perception of the news and people around you will shift.
Dr. Selepak is a program head and lecturer at the University of Florida. With a Ph.D. in Mass Communications, he has lately been the go-to in understanding trends, the power of social media, and even legislative regulation on big tech. What makes Dr. Selepak interesting to me is his charisma for helping students understand how media is being fed to you and what you need to do to decipher the truth.
Media has bias. No matter what source. If there was a hand or even AI that wrote it, the media has bias. To fight this, Dr. Selepak states you need to simply receive your news from multiple sources. Boom.
Lucas Quagliata boils this down very simply for us. “Some organizations with bias present stories in ways that could certainly expand your mind and perspective. Watching Fox News or reading HuffPost isn’t going to seal you up in the conservative or liberal bubble, provided of course that you balance out that intake with other sources”(Quagliata, 2017).
What is interesting to me is the information you have gotten from these outlets has already gone through a series of gatekeeping. From a higher source, these opinion leaders have broken it down for you to understand.
Welcome to the two-step flow theory. The Two-Step Flow Theory relies on the idea that “opinion leaders pay close attention to the mass media and pass on their interpretation of media messages to others”(Lamb, 20). Big picture, people listen to other people. You are getting your news from influencers you trust whether it is online or in-person.
While I believe this theory to be accurate, I have a higher ambition for our society. And that is our overall understanding of our role in this theory. Let’s look at this chart to help us understand.
You are a dot. Not un-informed, but bottlenecked by the opinion leaders you listen to. So, how do you break this?
This all relates to what Dr. Selepak spoke to us about because it comes down to trust. Trusting your sources is one thing, but fact-checking is another. Taking advice from him, ensure you get your news and media from multiple sources. Diversify your subscriptions to get both sides. From there, you are now the gatekeeper of your own attitudes and ideas. This will lead to a further progression of us as a society because we are now accurately informed and not reliant on our single-source being correct.
Gate Keeping theory is also simply broken down. As news is happing all around us constantly, you cannot choose to cover and listen to it all. It comes down that “ someone has to decide whether and how to pass the information to another person, such as a friend, an official, or even a journalist”(Shoemaker, 2013).
While it is impossible to control everything, I am asking for you to be more cognizant. Understand that your information has been passed down through gatekeepers and influencers to you. Take a stand and become a thought leader by gathering more information and making informed decisions.
Here is your key takeaway:
Do NOT just listen to me. As someone else, google it, or read about these theories elsewhere so you can create your own ideas and interpretations. Congrats, you are informed.
Sources:
Lamb, B. (2019, October 3). The Two-Step Flow Theory: VCE Media, Victorian Curriculum, Media Arts, digital literacy, media education, filmmaking. Lesson Bucket. https://lessonbucket.com/media-in-minutes/the-two-step-flow-theory/.
Quagliata, L. (2017, May 19). How to Read the News. Medium. https://medium.com/that-good-you-need/how-to-read-the-news-9ab0c18c8cb5.
Shoemaker, P., Johnson, P., & Riccio, J. (2013, October 29). Gatekeeping. obo. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756841/obo-9780199756841-0011.xml#:~:text=Gatekeeping%20theory%20is%20the%20nexus,official%2C%20or%20even%20a%20journalist.
