News is an unpublished account of public human activity, that seeks primarily to interest, guide, or inform the readers about current affairs. It is simply like a fresh piece of cake coming out of the oven. However, anything, that has ever come into print prior to, doesn’t actually constitute news. “News” has a very elastic definition and is dependent on the observer’s point of view.
No matter how well written and documented any given news article or news report is, it cannot be considered newsworthy if it is not newsworthy for the reader. The concept of the news media as a whole is not based on any law or legal framework but rather is determined by what readers find newsworthy to be. Thus, whether airplane crashes are newsworthy depends on whether the general public finds the event to be newsworthy. However, even when the event is newsworthy to the public, it does not necessarily mean that it is newsworthy for the specific media outlet that published the event. A simple case of this is when a plane crash is reported by different media sources, it is only the first one that will make the story newsworthy to a particular publication.
Another interesting example is when there is so much false information on social media sites about some particular topic that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between what is real and what is false. Take, for instance, the recent controversy about the so-called scientists who claimed that there is a link between global warming and certain weather events. Many people were quick to point out that the scientists themselves do not hold a master’s degree in climate science and that there is no scientific basis to prove these claims. However, this does not stop social media users from sharing countless stories about these scientists with their millions of followers all around the world.