Media Ownership

News and information is how we enable ourselves to keep update with day-to-day life around the world and are informed almost to the minute when news breaks across the world. All thanks to the media, from the live on site journalists covering the unfolding news to it being distributed via visual, verbal or written format right in front of us, its unmissable. Although we trust that the media must be a reliable source the questions are asked, “who ‘owns’ and/or ‘controls’ the media you use to access your ‘news’ ? Does it matter ? and What trust do we have in our news sources ?”.

With the money required anyone can really own a media source. Examples such as Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook and a publicly recognised person and Rupert Murdoch, the owner of “Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation” which he owned two-titles account for almost 64.2% of the metropolitan circulation. Both of these highly successful men who have opened platforms that produce news and information quickly to our finger-tips have both breached codes of ethics and make us reiterate this question “What trust do we have in our news sources ?” Recent allegations have found that separately Mark Zuckerberg and Rupert Murdoch in hot water on their own media platforms.

The Mark Zuckerberg case in which found data breaches to users accounts, breaches of data that included Names and passwords. This being such a risk as a media company called Cultura Colectiva based in Mexico had this data stored, although publicly stored people that obtained passwords that are the same as they may be for Facebook had the potential risk of hacking to other private information. This put Zuckerberg under scrutiny as there was no privacy control on the media platform and therefore exposed many users that had trusted Facebook.

Rupert Murdoch chairman and chief executive officer or News Corporation, a news corporation in which runs various newspapers across the world. Rupert too broke the trust of millions of readers across the world when an investigation carried out in 2005 to 2007 on News of The World found that employees of the newspaper company headed by Rupert Murdoch were found to have hacked phones that of “celebrities, politicians, and members of the British Royal Family, in July 2011 it was revealed that the phones of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, relatives of deceased British soldiers, and victims of the 7 July 2005 London bombings “

For me, anyone can control your media sources. The perfect example of this being Mark Zuckerberg. He was only a university student creating a media platform for users to message and share pictures or videos in which now has become a viral success. He did not have any qualifications in this nor did was he certified to be either reliable or trusted. I believe the news that is fed to us daily and the platforms that we access it from are un-trustworthy. The influence in which the news is delivered is upheld by the ideologies of a higher person (the owner) such as Rupert Murdoch who is a far right activist in politicians who makes his view evident when covering political related stories. News at its most reliable is when it is live-streamed. It is at its truest form and can not be manipulated in anyway. As live-streaming is becoming a very big way of social media it helps viewers such as myself to gain more trust in news sources. A very big shift in the way news has ever been delivered before.