ONLINE JOURNALISM SHOULD BE CONTROLLED

In today’s modern world where there are lots of medium for people to get information, internet has been the most referred medium for people disseminate and receive information. The reasons why people choose the online stream are because it is free from any filtering and gate keeping from the third party. Therefore, people are free to post or write any news that they want or any opinion to influence people.

In online stream, public can express what they feel and what they think about the journal or the news that was published on the internet. We seldom see on the internet where some people talk bad things about other religion, using vulgar words towards other races during voicing out their opinion in the feedbacks column. It is all because it is free, people are allowed to write anything.

It cannot be denied that online journalism can give positive input towards people in certain things like education. But if it is not controlled, it can lead to a bad impact on the social harmony, especially radical type of journalism about politics. This can be dangerous as words can influence people to react against certain party, for example what if the radical articles can influence a nation to fight against their own government? It can lead to destruction.

This matter must be taken seriously as people now are turning to online journalism. It can be said that most of them are teenagers, the one who will be leading the country in the future. So we cannot let their minds being poisoned by those types of radical articles that can lead to negative mindset.

Not only it can bring harm to harmony, it can also damage a relationships or individuals reputation. There are some irresponsible individual who spread false news or information in their article or what so ever. This is called defamation, as some people may publish publically on the online stream saying bad things about an individual, mostly an important, influential, and high ranking individual such as the prime minister of the country. There are lots of attempts that have been done by some bad mouth to inflict bad reputation towards some important individuals.

It is a big scare if people blindly believe at what they are seeing without any investigation or referring to other reliable source. What feared the most is that people will start to share those kinds of article with their friends and the public through the internet.  It shows how powerful words are so online journalism should be controlled so that peace and harmony in a nation can be maintained.