Social Media Beats Out Mainstream Media

I hadn’t even heard about Senator Davis’ filibuster until reading Roxane Gay’s article. I don’t recall seeing any coverage about this very important event at all. This proves her point perfectly. Mainstream media only shows us what they deem to be important and significant while the events that actually matter get swept under the rug. Clearly this was very important to a lot of people and should have been covered. Gay points out that over 180,000 people from around the world were watching the YouTube stream at one point. If Twitter and YouTube didn’t exist, very few people would have even known this has happened.

I’ll be honest. I find out about a lot of things from platforms like Twitter and Reddit. I always learn about things on Reddit first. Sometimes Twitter if it’s something I’m following specifically. I don’t like watching mainstream news because it’s so clearly biased and pushes an agenda on people. Our citizens are free agents who need unbiased information to make decisions for themselves and mainstream media makes that almost impossible. Social media definitely has its drawbacks, but I believe it does a much better keeping people informed than the mainstream media does. Something needs to change in order to give mainstream media the credibility it once had.

Comments

  1. Steve MacekApril 25, 2017 at 2:39 PM

    You-- and Gay-- make a good point about the importance of social media as a way of compensating for a malfunctioning mainstream media. Yet I wonder if one the MAIN informational functions of social media is to raises issues to the level of visibility (via trending Twitter topics, trending search terms, etc.) needed for the mainstream media to take them seriously and report on them.

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