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.
