Journalists are needed now more than ever.
The role of the media today is now more critical than ever.
From Donald Trump’s election campaign to his presidency, the seeds of distrust in the news media has ingrained itself into the American zeitgeist. The use of the phrase “fake news” has been a way to deflect any reporting that you may find disagreeable.
With the advent of the internet, it has been difficult to discern between credible news sources and alternative news sources. The internet has made the battlefield between good, serious journalism and the authoritative attacks against it even harder.
Journalists of this era have their work cut out for them.
To protect the free press against the current administration’s efforts to discredit it, journalists must look back to past examples of triumphant investigative reporting and learn from them if they want to change this adverse climate against them.
In the film All the President’s Men, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the truth that their newly elected Republican president Richard Nixon had tried to cover-up the wiretapping and bugging of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel. This abuse of power resulted in The Washington Post taking on the U.S. government. Woodward and Bernstein ultimately succeeded, and Nixon resigned.
This underdog story shows that journalists have the power to draw attention to the wrongdoings of the U.S. government. But how do you change the minds of people who support the current administration’s efforts to smear the image of the free press? We must look at the investigative team Spotlight of The Boston Globe for this solution.
In the film Spotlight, the investigative team of Spotlight learns of the history of sexual abuse against minors in the Catholic Church. From only a few cases of sexual abuse in their local church of Boston, the Spotlight team learns that this goes up even higher. The group takes several months to gain hard evidence and facts for their story and eventually publish it. Boston, where the news agency resides, has a deep-rooted history of Catholicism, and for the Catholic population to learn of these horrible acts is a hard pill to swallow. Met with denial at first, the Catholic Church faced reparations thanks to the investigative team at Spotlight.
With cold hard facts and evidence and the ability to draw attention to the wrongdoings of the U.S. government, the free press is a constitutional right for Americans to challenge the government in the time of need.
The current global pandemic of the coronavirus leads to the spread of disinformation across the internet. The role of journalism is now even more critical than ever.
We can learn from the actions of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post and the Spotlight team of The Boston Globe to thwart the spread of disinformation and prevent attacks on the first amendment with the authoritative ideology of “fake news”.
In this time of uncertainty, people need a greater sense of digital literacy to discern between factual journalism and the real “fake news” from biased alternative news sources. Journalists have the power to help with this digital literacy by providing avenues in which to educate the masses of their constitutional rights and the ability to shed light on any wrongdoings of the U.S. government.
