There is another article by Tessa Wong in the ST today on social media with the central theme that social media is unreliable and people are warned to read it with a big pinch of salt. And she quoted one reader thinking so after reading social media and getting more doubtful about its credibility.
She continued to quote several more questionable postings in social media that were more of rumour mongering or untruths. The only instance that social media was praised was for saying the right thing, about the Yaw affair in Hougang. Here social media scored brilliantly.
Nothing was mentioned about the key role that social media has contributed on the AIM saga, the Brompton Bike saga, the hawker cleaning saga, the plight and unhappiness of the people on the influx of foreigners, plight of PMETs and job discrimination and high cost of living and the housing bubble. The contributions by the social media and independent bloggers digging for the truths, making investigations without being paid, and revealing many things that were not reported in the main media, not the right things maybe, are simply remarkable and as honest as it can be. And definitely more worthy of news reporting, more professional and important to be reported to give a balance picture of an affair.
Tessa Wong went on to talk about a survey conducted by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) which found ‘that on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is most untrustworthy and 5 is very trustworthy, the Internet received 2.82 on the average while television scored 3.55 and newspapers 3.58’.
She qualified that half of the respondents felt that there is too much govt control over the main media and that the newspapers and main media are biased in the political reporting. She further commented that ‘Such findings show that credibility is a complex creature’.
Allow me to add a few points. The main media is about a whole lot of other news other than social and political news. The social media is mainly about the latter. The second point I would like to make is that when the main media has too much govt control and is biased, how would it affect the honesty of the reports? Would too much control leading to being biased be another way of saying that the main media is not credible also, not telling the whole truth? How can a control media with the intention of reporting what it wants to report and reporting it in a biased manner be reliable and credible? You think and you find your own answer to that.
Perhaps a better comparison or survey will be to compare the reports and commentaries in social and main media on social and political issues. It is a given fact that 99.9% of non social and political news are factual and unlikely to be misleading or false. Some business and economic news could be misleading as they affect the companies and the stock market.
Also, the sample of a survey can easily be biased by the choice of the respondents and what kind of questions were being asked or cooked. This can be easily proven if I would to conduct a similar survey here on the reliability and credibility of the social media and main media just on social and political issues. I beg the findings can be shocking and contrary to what IPS found.
Shall I do it just to prove how biased even a survey can be and how biased a commentary on the credibility and reliability of social versus main media can be, as said, the issue is more complex than a survey can designed to cover the vital parts.
Chua Chin Leng aka redbean
* The writer blogs at http://mysingaporenews.blogspot.com/