Sunday, September 21, 2014

You can't buy credibility, or can you?

Sean Dicks
sd099211@ohio.edu


There is so much going on in the world of news reporting. ESPN has practically turned into the new TMZ for sports with all of the recent allegations concerning domestic violence and child abuse. With all of the videos and facts that have come from these stories, it really makes you wonder how the reporters have gained the information they have.

It seems as if reporters these days are so ruthless that they are willing to do just about anything to find details on the stories they are covering. I'm not saying there aren't honest journalists in the world, but with all of these unethical scandals, it makes you think about where the good ones are. It also makes you think about if the most trusted reporters are being unethical.

Sketchy Journalism

As a consumer of the news, I want to know that the people reporting the news are people that I can trust. Behind-the-scenes deals in news reporting have no place in the business.

Any time money is brought into a situation, it complicates everything. People act different when money is involved, especially when there is a lot of it being tossed around.

With money comes bias, and with bias comes questionable, opinion-based news.

This past December, bribery scandals swept the capital of China when two reporters were detained for accepting money to fabricate stories in the Beijing Youth Daily.

According to an article on CaixinOnline.com, Xiong Xiong and Yang Kairan, the men acquitted in the case, had reportedly accepted over one million yuan, which is equal to $164,000 in the U.S. Both men had worked for the paper for over 10 years, which forces the public to wonder how long they were doing this.

It all makes sense

It is clear why reporters are unethical. Every reporter wants to be better than the next, and they want their stories to get more praise and fame. I truly believe that good reporters can find the facts ethically if they work hard enough on a story.

Walter Cronkite is very respected in the world of journalism. He probably had the right intentions when he signed up for the video series, "American Medical Review," but when it was released that it was sponsored by drug manufacturers, he immediately backed out.

Being apart of this series, which aired on PBS, could have jeopardized Cronkite's credibility, and could have made the public question what his morals are.

Luckily the series wasn't worth it enough for Cronkite to continue, but many other journalists in today's world would've taken the job in a heart beat, and not thought twice about the message the sponsors would bring to the public.

(Walter Cronkite, Google Images)

Money is the motivator

One of the biggest scandals that has recently swept the U.S was the Donald Sterling audio recording that was released early this year. Sterling owned the Los Angeles Clippers until he was banned from the league in April. In a phone call to Sterling's girlfriend, Sterling is cited as saying that he didn't want African Americans coming to his games.

(Video from Youtube.com)

Keep in mind that Sterling, 80, is married for 50 years to Rochelle Sterling, and his girlfriend on the side, the one that revealed the recording, was 31.

Sterling is worth billions of dollars, and was pampering his girlfriend with anything she wanted, yet she still went and released the recording. I don't think what Sterling said was appropriate in any way, shape, or form, but I wonder if there was some type of money involved in the releasing of the recording.

TMZ were the ones who first released the recording, just like they were the first to report on the Ray Rice incident. I truly wonder how they have been getting access to these high-profile stories. Are they doing it in an ethical way? Or are they paying for their stories like some of these reporters for The Sun recently have been.

As I mentioned earlier, there is no place in the journalistic world for bribery. Money changes the way stories are reported, and makes the name of the game unethical, and unfair.









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