Mass Media and News Stories

Diego Ruiz Duran is a criminal lawyer with excellent credentials living in and working around Mexico City, Mexico. As a passionate lawyer, pleading for justice across all strata of society, Duran has learned to be cautious and careful about news media sources.

The slant may be extremely liberal, or at the opposite end, extremely conservative, but no matter which side they are on, journalists, and in particular television journalists rarely have the time, nor insist on the time to fully analyze stories.

Trump who insisted that the presidency was stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats launched with his allies over 40 lawsuits in various states. Trump lost them all, yet he insists to this day he won the election.

Some conservatives suggested that Trump declare martial law and take back the presidency by force with the help of the military, while Trump himself insisted that Vice President Mike Pence, in the January vote of the electoral college, had the authority to change the votes. He didn’t and proceeded to ignore Trump.

According to the LA Times, Fox news supported spurious news with a slant on Trump’s positions on immigration, policing, the COVID-19 pandemic, and tried to legitimize broad conspiracy theories besides the election stealing lie. At the same time, when the idea of fake news really popped up in 2016, not long after the BBC reported in 2007 an overwhelming flood of Fake News from the left.

In 2018, a study by the Rand Foundation used Artificial Intelligence to analyze newspapers, broadcast journalism and online journalism.

The study revealed that the language of newspapers remained pretty much the same as the language of newspapers 30 years ago. However, with television news, beginning around about the year 2000, the language used was much more opinionated, either with a liberal or a conservative point of view. 

This is perhaps proving problematic as a Pew Research Study suggests that those who get their news from social media are not only less engaged, but less knowledgeable. But even nationally broadcast news stations are a problem. Just because a station is on 24-hours a day doesn’t make it reliable. They have to find some way to keep viewers glued to the set, and that mostly happens through opinionated guests. Ultimately, says Diego Ruiz Duran, people now more than ever have to analyze the source and biases of their news as well as the news itself.