Superhero Journalists

By: Joseph Scott

Journalists can be real life superheroes. They expose crimes and sometimes take on entire organizations. They keep public figures in check. They are secondary law enforcement, picking up where the cops left off and seeing it through until the end.

Movies like All the President’s Men and Spotlight show real life journalist “superheroes” doing their thing. These groups of people have exposed and taken down some very bad people all through their work. The pen truly is mightier than the sword.

These old flicks depict investigative journalism and the incredible amounts of work that had to be done in order to achieve what the groups did in each of their respective stories.

In All the President’s Men, the audience gets to see some of what it was like for the two journalists that exposed the Watergate Scandal. The audience gets to see the two journalists go through the troubles necessary to find sources, people willing to talk, and staying safe while investigating what some could say is “sketchy” stuff.

In Spotlight, the audience gets to witness what the crew of journalists at the Boston Globe had to do to expose the Catholic Church’s cover ups of sexual harassment. They worked for well over a year gathering the evidence and tying up loose ends. They did all of that just to make sure they were not wrong. Eventually, they had the evidence needed to publish the story and expose the Catholic Church and all of its wrong doings.

It is truly amazing what some of these old news groups and journalists were able to do. It sometimes feels like nothing like that happens anymore.

Some might think the good old days of journalists taking down bad guys is over. That could not be further from the truth. Some crimes are being exposed, some as recently as the past few years.

In 2016, “The Panama Papers” were released. The papers showed how some of the rich were using offshore accounts to hide their assets and setting up front companies to hide everything else. It won the “Gold Barlett and Steele Award” that year.

With the constant bombardment of groups saying that the media is “fake news,” it is easy to forget what good journalism is being done. The prevalence of what many would call “fake news” websites are not helping the legitimate websites either.

It can be easy for the public to forget what good journalism has done for this country when all that is ever being pointed out are the few bad accounts. Public figures, and even other news networks, accuse rival news networks of producing fake content.

With all of the accusatory claims being thrown left and right, it can be easy for the public to be deceived. It can be easy for them to think that the news is lying to them. This adds nothing to society, and it can easily harm it.

What needs to happen is simple, yet very hard to attain. The real fake news organizations need to be shut down (whatever they may be), the public needs to remember to fact check for themselves, and news organizations need to look out for one another’s credibility. It sounds simple, but it probably is not.

Originally published at https://medium.com on April 29, 2019.