Who the heck is a journalist?

Personally, I think there are many forms of journalism.  Twitter, online news sources, bloggers...all contribute to the big magical world that is journalism.  Some of these forms of journalism are less reliable (I don't consider Kanye West's tweets to be particularly groundbreaking in the field of journalism) but I don't think it's right to discredit them too quickly.  Journalism is changing; newspapers aren't as prevalent as in years past.  It's also important to keep in mind that blogs, twitter, and the like are fairly new innovations and that we may not be able to consider their journalistic merit completely for many years to come.  Then again, I do think it requires more than a whim to become a journalist.  Anyone can wake up and say, "Hmmm.  Today I want to educate the public on the news of the world.  AWWWW YEAHHH!" but that does not a journalist make.  There needs to be something there to give credibility.  I'm not positive whether I think a degree is required to make a good journalist; the training certainly can't hurt.  However, I'm also pretty sure that journalism is a field in which "amateurs" can be just as truthful, or even more so, as "professionals."  I've personally learned a lot about the situation in Egypt from Twitter.  In short, journalism can always benefit from new outlets, yo.  Also, I'm pretty sure Twitter is going to take over the world one day, so we might as well practice Twitter-nalism while the art is still young.  Just sayin'.

Who do journalists work for?

No, really.  Who do journalists work for?  The obvious answer to that question would be the people!  Of course!  Hurrah, hurrah, preserving liberty through the fair and unbiased reporting of the truth and all that jazz.  But is that just a concept that ought to be true but isn't?  Sure, journalists should serve the people first, but in this day the money is what it's all about.  Personally, as a future journalist (hopefully), I am pretty freaking serious about my duty to the citizens.  They deserve to know the truth.  However, the decline of the newspaper has made a serious dent in income for many respectable publications, so the reality is that journalists are encouraged more and more in their own line of work to be loyal to the corporation of journalism.  I very strongly believe that a journalists first duty is to the people, but I also think that recently there is more pressure on journalists to bring in money.  This means that being a watchdog comes second.  What a sad, sad, truth.  Oh well.  At least I can distract myself by watching Star Wars for six hours straight tonight.

Truth and Journalism

Truth is defined as, "The true or actual state of a matter" on Dictionary.com.  As far as I'm concerned, that's a pretty difficult phrase to understand.  The literal meaning of the words isn't hard to decipher, but when you actually begin to decide what that means, that's when there's a problem.  In class, we discussed whether truth is really something that a journalist even is able to publish.  We talked about whether or not something is true if we don't have all the information about the event at the time of publishing.  Truth is a tricky subject all around, not in the least because what is true to one person may be false to another.  Does that mean that an opinion can be true, even if it has opposition?  As journalists, we are told not to involve opinion in our articles and research, but is it even possible to get rid of every bit of bias?  And if it is, does that alter the truth?  Does the context of the event or the context of the writer's opinion add to the truth or detract from it?  The more questions you ask, the easier it is to see that a dictionary definition of truth cannot grasp exactly what truth is. 

Truth is what we, as journalists, much search for.  That means that we always have to ask ourselves what the truth is.  Truth is different in journalism.  To tell events in a true, fair fashion means providing relevant context while still knowing when context tampers with the ability of the reader to form an opinion.  That's our job.  To provide information in order to let readers decide what they think about a story.  That mission requires the truth, which is why there is so much talk about "spin" and bias.  People want to know the absolute truth about an event.  The fact is, truth is hard to share.  We all have our own views and they directly influence our writing and researching of a story.  The best we can do is share what we know to be true about a story at any given time.  We write about what is actually a hard fact about a case, and then we have to make a judgment call about how much context is necessary to help the story make sense.  Just like the swimsuit at the beach conversation that we had in class, context can make or break the truth to a reader.  So I would say that a lot of the truth lies in context.

Truth is not an opinion.  Truth is not something that you can decide arbitrarily and without thought.  You have to ponder it, detach an event from yourself, and give the plain facts.  You lay those facts out on the table and piece them together, picking out as much bias as you can.  Then you fill the gaps in between with context.  That's the only way we can get at the truth, is to look at is as something to be figured out and put together.  There really is a formula for discovering truth, in my opinion.  It isn't always obvious or blatant, and if we are being fair to the public, as journalists we must commit ourselves to reporting truth only with the utmost care and thought.