Our regular diet involves news. Such news is told with confidence, making us believe before we even check for the accuracy. Most of our habits are to consume these with our morning cup of tea. Then likely to spread them before breakfast. We even react to the news before even reading the whole content.
Especially, we are seeing this in the online news very clearly. Many of the newspaper’s targets aim to engage the audience with varying levels of attention-seeking. They are skilled in understanding how to create quick reactions in the audience, so that their news can more widely come to notice.
Techniques are known to the creators of the news -- how to make various audiences believe them, reacting and sharing before verifying. They target a versatile level of audiences with the news. This includes deeply emotional, fearful, and mostly content which is unusual and can grab attention very easily.
As we know, news should be something ‘new’, to let people know about what is latest in the world. But by trying to create something new for people, they are confusing the audience. People are dwelling in darkness with news which is not true in whole, or even partly, not even willing to verify it.
This is the most common scenario. But my question is, why would we be this easily fed with this sort of news? We are not puppets or robots that someone is trying to give us inputs, and believing and reacting to them is our regular duty.
But not focusing on faults, we need to see what is really happening. The main issue here is, people tend to believe the incidents or information they feel familiar with, what their surroundings and known people are sharing, and what matches with their beliefs.
This happens because most of our minds are now busy with dealing with shortcuts. We are not always sharp enough to think about crosschecking.
Crosschecking demands media literacy, awareness, as well as time. As our attention span becomes lower, our minds drift away from these things.
If we dive deeper, people are making their emotions viral, not the facts or truth. Only headlines are being read, mostly not the essence of the main news. If the audience could carefully read what is combined inside the news, they might be able to see what they are actually feeding their brains. They might be able to have the sense to crosscheck the details before believing.
The consequences of not crosschecking are unfortunate. Experience says, people who once believed a lot of information without crosschecking first now have very little trust in any kind of news they get.
People might get into trouble by relying on all news without checking. They can develop emotional stress, imperfect decision-making, as well as social or legal trouble. They might get caught in a wave between the noise and truth.
We know that there might be easier and shortcut ways for anything in the present world. Similarly, the consumption of ‘easy catching’ news without cross-checking is very easy to do. As we are the representatives of how the news is taken, we should be smarter than before for our own sake.
Each time trying to know and accept the truth by crosschecking might be a hard, but that will be a better way to know the exact words on what's happening around us. We can choose to pause, question, and give the voice of truth in a world full of noise and whispers.
*Tasmia Sistri is a final year student of Media Studies and Journalism at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.