Misinformation and Disinformation: Journalism's biggest enemy

Journalism is defined (from my college's standards) as reconstructing reality in an objective manner. The question that lies ahead, however, is what actually is reality?

The difficulty in reconstructing a story is already pretty high, as one must put in a level of trust into a person, whether we know them to be true or not. The different accounts of the same story hold the journalist in a position where they have to use their best judgment when it comes to making the decision of what to use in a story.

It is not necessarily on the journalist themself to purposefully make mistakes and spread false information; this narrative comes from those who don't trust the media/journalists at all. The Trump Administration was notorious in their war against media outlets, but this isn't to say that the media hindered his campaign and run as president... it just hindered us instead.

In the case of the Trump Administration, every bit of media coverage that the former president got (whether good or bad) was seen as a benefit to him. However, he introduced us, or rather reintroduced the public to a term that was popular in his vocabulary during press conferences and interviews: fake news.

The thing about fake news is that it is exactly what it sounds like, but the concern here is that when it came to reporting on the president, it was actually true. In the eyes of the former commander and chief, Trump called any news fake news, or what is also known as misinformation. His identification as such made the environment towards journalists hostile, as his followers would follow suit in his claim.

The case study of the Trump Administration and the relationship to media outlets is interesting and entertaining, to be quite. But even more dangerously, Trump took the misformation one step further, and converted it into disinformation.

Spreading the false narrative that worked with his agenda, disinformation was perhaps the Trump Administrations biggest tool in the lack of action against one of the biggest obstacles faced as president, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ideas and misconceptions like "The pandemic isn't real" or the simple denial of kids being locked in cages at the Mexico border are all from the false narrative Trump created. Obviously the consequences of such spread of false information, or disinformation to be more exact, is very dangerous. But rather, it was and continues to be disheartening as both politicians and their supporters do not look outside of a restricted scope of information and sources so that it fits their own belief.