WORD SEARCH
CONCLUSION
With the ever changing ways the media is delivered to the public, we find that we are also constantly
changing where we look for our information and news. So much of today’s news is spread through social
media, so there can be a margin of error with what we hear and see in the news. There has been a lot of
controversy about boko haram, who they are and what they really are doing in Nigeria, and the surrounding
countries. The question is, what is fact and what is fiction?
The satirical forms of newscasting actually helped us to discern truth from truthiness. The colbert
report and The Daily Show were on point with much of the news from nigeria. In addition to their regular
jokes about everything, there were quite a few very valuable points that they brought across. Sure there were
jokes, especially about the people that criticised the hashtag campaign, but the points they brought up about
the kidnapped schoolgirls and the different attacks that boko haram has lead throughout nigeria were very
valid and crucial points that helped us determine what was fact or fiction. Who knew that fact checking
could actually agree with satirical comedians, or that comedians could actually tell the whole truth instead of
just being truthy.
One of the major forms of communication is the news, however, when one turns on the TV and watches the news are they honestly telling the truth? Information on Boko Haram quickly spreads and because
it is a scary issue we as a society have a difficult time discerning fact from fiction. It is influenced more by
opinion rather than the truth. News sources such as MSNBC and Fox use facts that are mostly true.
From the sources taken from Fox News it was obvious that the primary motives behind their reporting of
Boko Haram was to inform, although their reports were colored by the sources personal biases, with a truly
terrible organization that is doing such malicious things the biased facts were often correct even if exaggerated. The thing that was most obviously left out of the fox news articles were their external sources of information suggesting that they were just quoting other Fox News reports. While this is an easy practice for an
organization it promotes homophily and the perpetuation of unverified or outright false figures.
In all our research there were several pieces of truthiness that were common among many sources. It
was surprising just how much organizations will report numbers, percentages, practices, etc. that are false or
simply unverifiable simply because another organization reported them. We saw this in the case of the goldilocks number that Boko Haram was controlling 20% of the Nigerian territory. This example shows just how
important it is to compare multiple sources and use fact checking websites. Checking just 2-3 sources may
give you the same, false, information over and over, however, if you use a fact checking website you may find
that they are all wrong or exaggerated.
This project has certainly shaped the way all of us view the media. As we have examined each news
source we have come to a better realization of what our media diets really consist of and a lot of it is the same
regurgitated information, whether truth or truthiness. If we really want to find truth it requires a ridiculous
amount of work that most people just aren’t willing to do.
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