Where Have All the Journalists Gone?
When I was in high school back in the late seventies, we spent two years in a program where students could select semester-long English classes similar to college classes. All these years later, I remember those four classes better than most others I took in high school. One of them was Journalism, and that one had an especially large impact on me. Of course, some of the more technical aspects like column-inches are becoming obsolete as printed newspapers disappear (sad face emoji), but what is even sadder to me is that it seems like real journalism is disappearing even faster than print newspapers.
Just to fact-check my memory, I looked up the Wikipedia article about journalism. It says that “journalism is the practice of gathering, verifying, and reporting on information of public importance.” Next I looked at the section entitled “Journalism Ethics and Standards.” It says, “Truth, Accuracy, and Objectivity are cornerstones of journalism ethics. Journalists are encouraged to maintain a degree of detachment from the religions, groups, or countries they are associated with, in order to minimize potential biases in their reporting.” Notice what I did at the beginning of this paragraph? I fact-checked, also known as verifying.
One problem currently is that we all get the bulk of our information from sources that have no oversight in terms of enforcing journalistic or even legal standards. The regular network news, as in ABC, NBC, and CBS, are considered to be broadcast networks so are under the oversight of the Federal Communications Commission who are supposed to hold them to ethical standards. Others such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, are considered to be “cable” news networks, so are not overseen by the FCC. This is an important distinction because if you look at the backgrounds of most of the people you see on cable networks, you will find that they were not trained as journalists. Then you consider that we also get a lot of our “news” from websites, social media, blogs, YouTube videos, and other online media, and that is truly the wild, wild West—there is zero oversight to ensure those reports are unbiased and factual.
To this day, if you carefully look at how a print newspaper is organized, there will be the actual news, then there will be sections labeled “Opinion” or “Editorial” or “Op/Ed.” These are labeled so that you know this is someone’s opinion or individual perspective and may be biased or contain unverified information. What you are reading right now is a “column,” which Wikipedia says, “generally, but not always, contain the author’s opinion or perspective, making them akin to an open letter.” Sometimes I write verified facts, and all of the time I am writing from my perspective. I am careful, however, not to knowingly write untruths here. I also try to neutralize my biases on political topics in particular.
If you read my column from two weeks ago, you will probably recognize that I am carrying forward that same theme. Now I am trying to provide some help for those who are uninformed or misinformed. I have complete confidence in the intelligence of the general population but realize that it can be very difficult to sift the real truth out of all the information chaos and overload we have now. Perhaps the reason so many are “low-information” is because they have become so frustrated they just stop consuming news.