Journalism, Where’s it going?
By Johnny Benavides
The industry of journalism has seemed to be spiraling on a downward slope for many years.
The business has been lacked a lot luster for quite some time, but what is the cause? There may be a lot of reasons for it, I think a big reason it is a lack of diversity.
Many news outlets are just white people, and that has big implication on the audience. White people who never been shy to comment on the culture of people of color, criticize and disrespect us because they have no clue what’s happen or what they are reporting about is.
For example, in many music journalism outlets we see a white journalist report on hip-hop or r&b but only hip-hop artist they’ve listened to is Eminem, their white king who proclaims the one of the best to ever do it but ignore Redman whose style is identical.
I saw a Vulture segment on “Is Lil Pump actually a Good Rapper”, that segment was a joke because whoever wrote it is clearly not of the culture and should know that the hip-hop community that the artist does not make music for is the lyrical miracle hip-hop heads.
But he makes music for young teens and young adults who like to do drugs and love loud beats. We are not represented in newsroom, but let a picture of the company be distributed its everybody of color front and center. It feels like “We have minorities read our articles” which has a become a tiring act personally.
The manipulation in journalism is also a big factor of why journalism is in flux In McChesney “Understanding U.S Journalism I: Corporate Control And Professionalism” McChesney opens with a very strong statement.
“This system was not “natural” but the consequence of series of policies favoring monopoly and/or oligopoly in telegraphy and broadcasting and commercialism in media. Concentrated private control over the press with the aim of profit maximization, has been the rudder directing U.S journalism for more than century.”
With a private control of a business who job is to be nonpartisan, but the owner of the publication is obviously a big influence on what hits the streets or is put on the internet for public consumption.
For example, Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, the richest man in history owns a highly respected publication for over a century but it is now owned by a man whose funds are limitless at this point.
So would the paper give an honest report on Amazon, or is the fear of losing their job get in the way of reporting the truth. To understand when a business is failing we must look at all the factors to what is the reason, it might just be that journalist and bosses are just failing us.
