Nowadays, the mass media do not report the news; they make the news.

The mass media, once thought of as a reliable medium for the dissemination of news, is gradually losing the trust of its audience due to an increasing number and occurrence of exaggerated claims and even outright lies. This can be seen further on in the post from the quoted recent events. But before we begin, what is the definition of the term, "recent events"? "Recent", on its own, is defined to be of the immediate past or just previous to the present time (AND approximately the last 10,000 years, but that'd be far too unfeasible considering we're talking about news, which changes daily), which has an ambiguous connotation, while "events" signifies something that happens at a given place and time. Combining the meanings of the two words into that of one phrase, the definition of "Recent events" can be derived to be something that happens at a given place and of the immediate past.
On April 17 2007, The Straits Times published an article on the front page on the massacre in Virginia Tech. The massacre was described to be "America's deadliest ever school massacre". However, this claim is untrue. According to Wikipedia, the Bath School disaster claimed the lives of 45 people and injured 58, which had a higher death toll than the 32 in the Virginia massacre. It would've been more accurate to note this as the deadliest ever school shooting, instead of exaggerating the event and claiming it to be the deadliest massacre.
This does not mean that only disasters are the victims of the media's tweaking of facts. Even something as trivial as Madonna's visit to Malawi can be abused by the media to increase readership at the expense of truth. News24.com accuses the orphanage of "mobilising" the orphans to chant slogans and throw stones at journalists to deter them from approaching the orphanage. But such a thing never occurred, according to a journalist at Associated Press, who made no mention of such an act, and only mentioned about the police and Madonna's security preventing journalists and onlookers from entering the compound.
Another example of the media coming up with false figures is the sheer number of different statistics provided by different news sources, with a huge contrast between Washington Post's 1,300 deaths in Iraq and The New York Times' 246 casualties, even though both of them claim to have obtained their figures from the same source, namely Baghdad's main morgue.
However, we cannot merely look at the faults and inconsistencies between the media and the truths and ignore the fact that the mass media is ALSO reporting the news, though a small amount of it may be altered. The crux of the matter is to acknowledge the fact that the mass media is our most important source of news while at the same time realising that we must not only rely on one avenue of information to get the whole truth, because the media tends to report half truths, and half truths make for good lies, thus cross-referencing with regards to news items is required.