It seems acceptable now to put anything up online without checking its veracity first

WHAT h a s h a p p e n e d t o Jo u r - nalism? WHEN I was young if you wanted some information you turned to your trusted encyclo- paedia.

Now our children turn to the internet. Unfortunately what they are looking up cannot always be relied on.

The advent of fake news has shaken journalism to its core; there are social media outlets making up stories or putting headlines on stories to draw readers in, even though they have no connection to the story.

While social media puts the world at our finger tips, it also puts a world of untruths at them too.

When I started off in journalism I worked for a radio station in the midlands.

We were not allowed to run the same story two hours in a row but if we did we had to rewrite it to freshen it up.

Recently I saw one news outlet lift a story in its entirety from another one, word for word.

Indeed, I have had media outlets lift some of my stories word for word and when I looked for payment I was promptly ignored.

I cannot understand how journalism has been allowed to decline to such an extent that being first to break a story is more important than taking the extra sixty seconds to proof read it.

I have read stories that not only make no sense but have ended mid-sentence.

There is also a trend now of ‘ lifting’ stories.

Again, when I was training to be a journalist we were taught if we saw a story we wanted by all means you could use the same source, but only by contacting them yourself and taking the story from a different angle.

Now, if some online news outlets want a story they just take it and quote the other publication.

To me it just seems lazy.

It’s so important to check your facts and make sure your source is correct.

I have to say in my nineteen years as a journalist I have only been caught out once through being given false information. But now it seems acceptable to just put anything online and deal with the consequences after. The whole concept of sensationalism is bringing unnecessary fear to people. A quick headline can cause hysteria, as we saw with the bread shortages earlier this year.

You had people with loaves of bread going off in their homes, after fighting their way through crowds just to get them as if Ireland was going through a famine. Fianna Fail has proposed a number of measures to help alleviate some of these problems by the creation of a Minister for Media, the expansion of the role of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland and the creation a Print Journalism Unit to secure the quality of print journalism. I think this sounds like a great idea. I’d like to see a move away from ‘armchair’ journalism and a return to properly researched stories with clear facts, proper editing and if not at least a spellcheck, and being given the assurance that what you read is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. (Inset), Donald Trump who has coined the phrase ‘fake news’ to critical coverage of his Presidency.