I Certainly Hope Journalists Start Getting Better at Referencing Others

Journalism deserves to be held to higher standards than it has been.

In the past six months, I haven’t been looking at the current events to see what’s going on. I have read articles on Medium and other sites, but the ones I’ve been reading are not about current events, to the best of my memory. The exceptions to this would be instances where I am checking to see if the media has solved the problem that I will discuss in the next paragraph. So far, they haven’t.

The issue is that they often don’t link their sources. You can notice this just by opening Google News and clicking on the links. This means that there is no way to know if anything they are saying is valid, fair, or accurate. I am aware how vital it is to read the news critically, but this is not realistic when you don’t have the sources. This is because I run into situations where I see a sentence or paragraph that makes me think, “I can see how that could potentially be a misreport but I don’t know because I don’t have the original source.”

As a result, why should I trust the news for current events any more than some random person? If you, the reader, ever deliver information on current events, please strive to link to original sources when necessary. Until this practice becomes more common, the most reasonable course of action for me is, sadly, to stay uninformed.

I offer evidence for this in the following article: