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Punzalan's Case: Media's Impact on Justice

Mr. Nestor Punzalan and his family suffered greatly after Top Gear wrongly accused him of being involved in a shooting incident. This led to them receiving hateful comments and death threats online. While citizen journalism aimed to inform the public, social media instead made the situation much worse by allowing netizens to attack and threaten Mr. Punzalan. There are both positive and negative effects of media - it helped clarify the situation but also wrongly influenced people against Mr. Punzalan initially. We must be careful what we share online, think through potential impacts, and verify information as not everything on social media is necessarily true.

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Rheny Bondoc
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2K views1 page

Punzalan's Case: Media's Impact on Justice

Mr. Nestor Punzalan and his family suffered greatly after Top Gear wrongly accused him of being involved in a shooting incident. This led to them receiving hateful comments and death threats online. While citizen journalism aimed to inform the public, social media instead made the situation much worse by allowing netizens to attack and threaten Mr. Punzalan. There are both positive and negative effects of media - it helped clarify the situation but also wrongly influenced people against Mr. Punzalan initially. We must be careful what we share online, think through potential impacts, and verify information as not everything on social media is necessarily true.

Uploaded by

Rheny Bondoc
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
  • Case Study

Case Study

Suspek sa Pagpatay sa Isang Siklista, Binigyan ng MPD ng Hanggang 5pm Para Sumuko

In the video, Mr. Nestor Punzalan was greatly affected by being wrongfully accused by the Top
Gear. To the point that he and his family are receiving hateful comments towards their life and even
sending death threats. He and his family’s reputation suffered a lot because of the mistake saying that he
is involved in a shooting incident.

Top Gear’s, media outlets’ and netizens’ action did not help in building the issue to be solved but
it brought the situation to a worst issue. They are all responsible or accountable for having the image of
Mr. Punzalan broken and for being bashed and roasted on the social media.

Citizen Journalism played the role of being an instrument in letting the public know what
happened and to warm other people to be safe always. While social media wanted also to help, but on
the opposite of what had happened, they accidentally played the role of making the situation worst.
Instead of helping the problem to be solved, they actually became the pathway for some of the netizens
to reach, bash, and send hate and death threats to Mr. Punzalan.

If we take a deeper understanding of the incident, there are two sides of it; the negative and
the positive effect of media information. The negative effect was Mr. Punzalan was wrongfully accused
because netizens easily believed what a credible page stated (Top Gear). Also, media information let
them know the information of Mr. Punzalan resulting to also know his family. But on the other side,
media information also helped in making the situation clear. By media information, the incident was
easily brought to the authorities and they took action on it as soon as possible. Also, because of media
information authorities were able to trace the real suspect and cleared Mr. Punzalan’s name to the
public.

We can always prevent such incident like the incident happened to Mr. Punzalan. Only by
having enough knowledge on viewing and producing just and right information on the social media. We
can also prevent it by using the power of citizen journalism properly without sacrificing any names.

If there is any lesson we can get from the incident of having Mr. Punzalan wrongfully accused,
that is to think before we click and to be a literate citizen journalist. Although j“think before you click” is
an overused slogan on social media, it best suits the situation. We must first think all the aspects that will
be affected the moment we say something online. Becoming literate citizen journalist also an important
lesson we must take. For not everything we see online be it posted or shared.

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