Brian Williams has gone, but false news is bigger business than ever

Every journalist seems to understand that there are some stories that are too good to check. It’s a warning label on some of the tales that probably beg to be true when they probably aren’t.  In the pre-social media era if someone was to publish a story that wasn’t true chances are that nobody would be able to catch on their lies and therefore there wouldn’t be any problems. However, in today’s society if a story that contains lies is published, chances are that they would catch on their lies so it’s hard for them to keep the truth away. It was recently discovered that Jayson Blair a New York Times reporter has plagiarised a dozens of stories.

I think that what this article is subtly pointing at is the importance of citizen Journalism. In the pre social media era, people didn’t posses smart phones, and many social media that emerged later, didn’t exist. With the society we live in today, not having a smart phone, possibly an iphone, is something shocking. And these smart phones have made it possible for people to do citizen journalism were they capture important pictures of videos of a story that is shown on the news and make it go viral so the credibility of the news paper goes down by ruining its rank within other companies.