Report findings show how landscape of news distribution is changing
President Donald Trump popularized the term ‘fake news’ in 2016 by using it to describe negative press coverage of his presidency.
Today, college students credit the term to their inability to discern truthful and accurate news coverage from misinformation and outright lies that pop up on their Facebook or Twitter feeds in the form of ‘clickbait’ headlines.
A recent study on the news diet of college students has found that almost half of its 5,844 survey participants lack confidence when discerning ‘real news’ from ‘fake news.’ It also showed that 36 percent of the respondents “distrust the credibility of any news” due to the threat of ‘fake news,’ according to the study’s report.
The study, called “How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians,” includes participants from 11 U.S. colleges and universities and was conducted by the Project Information Literacy Research Institute.
The findings show that almost all study participants consume news on social media platforms, with seven in 10 students getting their news from Facebook over the course of a week. Snapchat, Youtube and Instagram were also found to be frequent pathways to receiving news.
Source: The News Study Report. Graph by Steven Smith.
While 66 percent of study respondents agreed with the statement that “journalists make mistakes but generally try to get their news stories correct,” many remained suspicious of news organizations that published stories containing bias for profiteering purposes.
Some students at APU believe that a lot of the news on social media is skewed to appeal to a specific audience.
Dhyana Kimie-Brylka, a sophomore worship major, said she trusts ZU News as a news outlet, but thinks that some student news is biased.
A story was written by ZU News in 2016 about street art which included APU’s four cornerstones logo alongside the words “Money First.” The graffiti, which aimed to mock the university’s “God First” motto, was assumed to have been created by a student, but rumors later circulated that the art was produced by an employee.
Some employees felt the story was biased in framing it around the rising cost of attendance at APU when the artist was unknown.
Jim Willis, professor of communications at APU and veteran news reporter and editor, believes millennials should follow news media sources that have earned their credibility.
“If someone says they are trusting the news media less because of what they see on social media, I would tell them they are comparing apples to zebras,” Willis said. “Social media posts that are put up by citizen journalists and pseudo-news sites pushing an ideology are not equal to the news stories reported by trained, professional journalists. Standards for accuracy are all over the board for social media and are frequently off-the-charts inaccurate.”
Researchers also found that while national government, politics, traffic and weather are amongst the most popular news topics that students engage with, the rising popularity of political memes in the form of humorous images, videos, or text, indicate that the news habits of young adults are evolving alongside the changing landscape of news distribution.
Satire has become an integral part of college students’ lives, and political memes balance out what many interviewees in the study outlined to be a monotonous blend of breaking news notifications on their phones and articles about national politics.
P. Takis Metaxas, professor of computer science at Wellesley College and co-investigator of The News Study Research Team, speculates that if the trend of meme sharing and short-attention social media such as Snapchat and Instagram continues, then future adults will have a more visually entertaining attitude towards news.
“The volume of news reaching us, even today, makes us feel overwhelmed,” Metaxas said in an email. “A possible outcome is that future adults will rely even more on news aggregators.”
Metaxas presented the findings of The News Study report in a research panel at Harvard University on Tuesday alongside fellow study co-investigators.
While the future of news production is uncertain, Willis thinks that well-respected news organizations should keep applying high journalistic standards to their reporting.
“They don’t take the bait of those critics who constantly scream ‘fake news!’ while never producing evidence themselves to back up those claims,” Willis said.