The State of Journalism
By Hernan Pacas
Journalism defined as the reporting of news through media started off in Paris in the Early 1700’s.
The people of Paris would meet up in town to discuss, trade, and gossip stories. It became so popular that people started making a living out of spreading and writing stories. Thus Journalism was born.
Journalism nowadays is different, with there being so many media sources and stories to cover. Additionally, a whole variety of news and genres are covered ranging from fashion to entertainment to sports. Journalism is no longer only news as it once was and with the Internet, you can access all types of journalism in an instant.
However much of the journalism published today is not 100 percent factual and does not question authority or people like journalism used to. Also, journalism can be heavily biased in favor of certain political parties or views.
For example, as the “Understanding U.S. Journalism” article states: “Journalism is excessively sympathetic to causes favored by liberals and the left and prejudiced against the concerns of business, the military, social conservatives and religious minded people.”
Journalists are often hesitant to question the government, present their opinions on politics or politics leaders, and are often too scared to leak any dirty secrets that the government might be hiding.
In my opinion, journalism should be as it was in its earliest days with muckrakers ready to attack what they believe to be corrupt. I also would like journalists to have complete freedom in their writings and not have to conform to a certain view just because the public would see it as the right thing to do.
Also, I would like journalists to have less bias in their writings and be as neutral and unbiased as they can be. They would present the facts as factual as they can without spinning the story and portraying the story the way the media would like it to.
After all, journalism serves the public and the communities and they deserve to have authentic news. As the James Carey essay says “ the principal task and consequence of journalism is to form and sustain particular communities”. Journalism is everywhere nowadays and many people consume it through social media as well.
In my opinion, journalism should be serving the people and the community as it already is but it should try to reach new different audiences that usually wouldn’t pay attention to journalism. Journalism should serve the whole world attracting people of all types of races, beliefs, and religions. The perfect journalism utopia for 2019 would be a world with no fake news or heavily biased news. All the news stations and media sources remaining as neutral as possible while also focusing more on other topics that aren’t really covered such as technology and economy.
In addition, journalists wouldn’t be afraid to hold powerful people and institutions accountable for making the reported news as pure and authentic as possible.
This, however, is not the reality as many organization do the opposite of what I listed such as Fox News. Fox News is heavily biased towards their conservative causes and the political affiliations that they support. On top of that, the majority of the journalists at Fox News also share that same bias and are often big supporters of these political figures. That is why a lot of the news that Fox News puts out is not 100 percent factual and has been twisted to provoke reactions from the audience.
However, a news source that does a decent job of not being too bias or corrupt is BBC, a broadcasting organization in London. They are politically and commercially independent and answer only to their viewers.
In addition, they have a large number of young people, minorities, and gays working for them. That is great to see as they are diverse and are not trying to be politically biased as Fox News is. For the future, I would love if we had more news sources like BBC in America. Hopefully, a journalism revolution is upon us.
