LftS: Propagating Spin

4/5/2018

During this episode of Lessons from the Screen we will be looking particularly at the Deadspin Video showing several News Anchors reading a part of a script and talking about its reception and what it really means. We will also be going briefly over various other “news” stories flying around social media and the need for us to Fact Check Everything regardless of source. In this episode of Lessons from the Screen we will be talking about, Propagating Spin.

The Growth of Social Media has created a world connected in ways that shape our perceptions of our environment. They create underserved or artificial feelings of various emotions and create credibility or trust where it shouldn’t exist. According to a Pew Research Study over 60% of people get some news through social media and for non-white people that number is above 70% and climbing rapidly. Facebook (also the owner of Instagram) is still very much king of the roost in the social media market with more than 200 million monthly users in the US. A lot of these stories are credited as true because they come to us from people we trust in an environment we trust which allows the most off based stories to leech credibility and become legitimate. Even when the story is legitimate the spin on it is usually contextually false.