The amount of "yellow journalism" today is ridiculous and there is such a simple solution to stop it, fact check anything you read. There was a recent incident on the set of the movie "A Dog's Purpose". In this movie, there is a water scene in which a dog goes in to a resistance pool to replicate a river with rough water. while the dog was being put in the water, people on set were recording it. In the video the dog shows discomfort about going in to the water and what looks like the dog being forced in to the water by the dogs handler and trainer.
TMZ, not a credible news source, reported on this saying signs of animal abuse occurred on the set of the movie during this scene and they show the leaked video of the event. They titled this post "Terrified German shepherd forced into turbulent water", just from reading the title the reader is probably thinking about animal abuse. After this article came out, people became outraged with this movie for potentially harming an animal, which does not surprise me considering todays youth has become almost obsessed with animals, especially dogs.People called for the boycott of this movie all because they read an article on TMZ or heard from someone they know that a dog was potentially abused during the filming of this movie. The American Humane Association, the association that enforces safety guidelines for animal actors and validates that no animals were harmed during the making of films, was on set during the making of this film and even called in an independent third party to investigate this matter. The production company, Amblin Entertainment, said the dog had several days of rehearsal of water scenes to ensure he was comfortable with all the stunts and that in the video TMZ released the dog was not comfortable with doing the stunt that day so they did not film it then, but at a latter day. The independent third party concluded their investigation and found no signs of animal abuse. So by doing just the tiniest but of looking into this story I found out that this news story was indeed fake and probably made to get clicks on the story so TMZ could make more money.
If any amount of people did what I did, research the story, they would have found out that the article was not true and they would not have contributed to the spreading of fake news. Now that this news article was posted and spread like wild fire, the movie "A dog's Purpose" will most likely suffer from it even though the article was not true, its already done its damage. People will not go to see that movie because of this story, which will affect how much money the movie makes. This is one of a multitude of examples of how fake news will spread and effect the subject of the fake news. People need to fact check to avoid another incident like this one or even worse.
It was very interesting reading your blog. Reflecting on the psychological aspect of what happens when readers allow writers to influence their life’s with sensational news.
ReplyDeleteNow this is an interesting post. Do you see any studies or quantitative data that has tracked the speed of fake news spreading on the web? I wonder if a quick library search would come up with something, perhaps in a sociology, psychology, or media studies journals.
ReplyDeleteGreat point about the fake news surrounding that recent movie, "A Dog's Purpose." Perhaps link us to the investigation and video? Or would linking to the video perpetuate the fake news?