Comms 239

What is journalism? What is a journalist?

At the beginning of the semester, I had a basic view of journalism as a whole. I was initially planning on applying for the Print Journalism program and after working on my high school’s newspaper, I was definitely biased towards the print media. However, while taking this class, the assignment to read the New York Times opened my eyes to how much news I have actually always been getting from the Internet rather than print. It has proved to me that journalism is never what you think it is, and it might not even fit into one definition. I think the bare bones of the idea is the same but the way it is distributed has changed. Journalists no longer have to be trained and no longer need to be objective either.

I don’t think Journalism has stopped changing. I think the definition will continue to change until journalists are no longer necessary and we’re downloading information directly into our brains (though I doubt this will happen). Whether the public likes the media or not, they are what makes this country as free as it is - the freedom of speech.

I have decided to not apply to the program as I am transferring to BYU Hawaii this summer and I plan to major in International Studies with an emphasis in communications. This course has opened my eyes to how journalism can affect everyone in the world differently and the impact of global free speech could change the world.

Engagement and Relevance

I believe journalists should give people what the need to know, not what they want. Someone in the class said that we all thought that because we’re idealists, which I completely agree with. If we were going to give most people what they wanted, the headlines would always be entertainment journalism - Charlie Sheen gets booed on tour (http://thedailywh.at/2011/04/02/so-this-happened-of-the-day-12/) and Justin Beiber gets a haircut . The public doesn’t want to hear about the war in Iraq or the lack of women’s rights in Libya (http://thedailywh.at/2011/04/04/follow-up-of-the-day-eman-al-obeidi/) but it will some day be part of our history and just as we need to learn about World War II in school, we need to keep up with current events.

Comprehensive and Proportional

I think the most important thing about this section was the targeted demographics. It’s an easy trap to fall into because it’s so similar to marketing. I fit into a couple targeted demographics. Woman, Mormon (or religious) and very decided on one side of the political spectrum. It’s easy for me to just go to the sources that will support what I already believe in but that’s not what journalism is, to be balanced and proportional.Targeted demographics are a cheap way to draw large audiences but those audiences are limited in their viewpoints.

I recently wrote a paper about the differences between Deseret News and The New York Times after September 11th. While the New York Times published articles headlined “A War Without Illusions” which warned about knowing all the difficulties before rashly going into a war. While the Deseret News chose to focus on Bush and how he attended a prayer service, even though the actual article had about 2 lines describing the prayer service (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/863755/Bush-calling-up-Reserves-heading-to-New-York-after-prayer-service.html)

I follow a lot of blogs that only post the types of things that I want to see. For example, I used to work at Disney World so I follow a blog called www.dreamydisney.tumblr.com
and it posts pictures from Disney World. Since this is a specialty blog though, it doesn’t count as journalism. They could be making this blog purely for themselves, they’re not looking for a demographic to target, just Disney lovers.

Faith and Journalism

When I think of faith in the media, I think of movies like The Invention of Lying or Saved or tv shows like Big Love. It’s easy to mock other people’s beliefs (such as in the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umLUKBlpyoY) through a fictional story but in the news we must stick to the facts. I also think it’s important for journalism to adhere to the separation of church and state. National broadcasts shouldn’t show bias towards or against religion.

My home Bishop is actually a BYU graduate and Emmy award winning reporter for ABC News in Houston. He would often tell us about different stories he was covering and how it was impossible to avoid discussing the gospel and it’s influence in the places he went. For example, he was filming a story during a storm in a moving vehicle. He received an impression to immediately stop the car. It was raining so hard they couldn’t see where they were going and it didn’t appear as if there were any other cars on the road. Once the car stopped he hopped out and walked a couple feet in front of the car where they saw that the highway actually dropped off, due to an earthquake. (here’s an example of one of his stories: (http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/video?id=7220741)

Journalism as a Public Forum

Before journalism was published, printed, and broadcast, it started as a public forum. The power of the people’s voice. It is still used today in journalism because the public’s opinion matters. However, it’s hard to tell that there are people in the country that are moderate because the type of person that participates in news call-ins are normally the ones with the very, very strong opinions. It wouldn’t be interesting if someone called in and said they didn’t really care.

HLN channel’s tagline is “News and Views.” The journalists themselves don’t express their opinions in strong words but are hardly objective either. It’s interesting to hear people’s opinions on stories but it’s hard to avoid political biases which is a big flaw in the public forum. Another flaw would be the lack of checking sources when people can just call things in. For example, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLN_%28TV_channel%29#Nearly_a_victim_of_a_hoax) was nearly a victim of a hoax claiming that President Bush had died after fainting at a dinner in Japan.

Ethics in Journalism

When I was writing for my high school newspaper, I honestly did kind of struggle with the ethics aspect of journalism. It wasn’t something that necessarily worried me because it wasn’t a national paper that everyone would read; in fact, most of the students in my high school didn’t read it. So I started off by just quoting my friends. And then I started gearing my questions towards what kind of quote I wanted. Then I just started making quotes up for them and attaching their name to it. I knew they wouldn’t mind, but I also knew that as a journalist what I was doing was wrong. I wasn’t following the rules but most importantly I wasn’t being objective. I was skewing my stories to get the quotes that I wanted.

The New York Times has this list of ethics (http://www.nytco.com/press/ethics.html) that clearly states against those things. Thankfully I wasn’t writing for The NYT. If I was I obviously would have gotten better quotes. However it’s not unheard of. In fact, Stephen Glass did a lot worse. He made up story after story and source after source for The New Republic. Eventually he was found out and they actually made a movie about it, Shattered Glass, a preview for which can be seen here: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA4N9ex56jA).

Watchdog Journalism

I think the highlight or peak of Watchdog Journalism was the leak of the Watergate scandal. It’s the reason a lot of journalists get interested in journalism in the first place. I found out the other day that Woodward and Bernstein were actually not even assigned to the White House when they started investigating. They were assigned to the Metro beat. Which just goes to show how innovative they were at the time for really shaping Investigative Journalism. Even though it wasn’t their beat, they still felt a duty to get to the bottom of their investigation for the sake of the public. The public had the right to know who they elected. I really like this article (http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3736) that questions whether or not it was really necessary to know who their source, Deep Throat, was.

It’s interesting that even now this case has mysteries, covered in this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/weekinreview/05green.html). Even in the most intense watchdog journalism, it’s impossible to cover everything. It’s still incredibly inspiring.

Journalist as an Idealogue

This chapter seems to me to be questioning what makes a story news and what motivates journalists to publish it.

Unfortunately, one aspect that is not really a “value” but is covered quite frequently, is entertainment journalism. Recently, the craziness of Charlie Sheen has been covered and in this article proves that more and more people are covering it because people are more interested in that than they are in the revolts going on in Egypt and Libya.

Independence and Journalism

Most of my blog entries always relate back to the West Wing because that show is 7 seasons long and I just finished watching all of it within 2 months. But it’s still relevant. The West Wing depicts a fictional presidency with very real problems. The Press Secretary is often shown briefing the press in the briefing room, shown in this video (link).

After this group’s presentation, it made me think how White House Press Secretaries have obvious bias as they have been hired a Presidency of a certain political party. However, the news that they give the journalists is still relatively unbiased. Of course, they can spin the stories that would shed better light on the president, but they aren’t the journalists that actually write the stories.

The journalists on the West Wing actually never show any bias. Despite reports that journalists are mostly Liberal, the journalists are constantly questioning the motives of the president. They’re looking out for the well-being of the public and therefore have to question everything.

Obviously, this show is fictional, however I think it is a realistic depiction of journalists in the white house.

Loyalty/Journalism as a Profession

I think everyone can agree that a journalist’s loyalty lies with the citizens. It is part of the definition of “journalism.” To report the all of the news truthfully for the sake of the citizens, so that they can be aware of what’s going on around them. If journalists were reporting the news for their bosses or their advertisers, the news would be skewed. When the riots in Egypt were going on and one network decided to stop covering that to introduce their new iPad product, “The Daily,” that was the network working for themselves, not journalists. Because even if they weren’t covering it on tv, there was still a reporter from that network stationed in Egypt, getting news from citizens and reporting it to our citizens. That reporter was doing it for the sake of keeping citizens informed, not because their boss thought it would be good competition against the other networks (obviously not since they showed the ad for The Daily instead).