The way to the real journalism

Ji Ren
jr956710@ohio.edu


The topic for this last blog is back to the one that I wrote for this class at the beginning of this semester—ethics of journalism.

Coincidentally, I was showed a video about Chinese people blaming the western media for not reporting truths in my history class today. As a Chinese who is studying journalism in the U.S., the video actually makes me feel that I'm right in the middle.

To be honest, I have to say the video itself is kind of radical or it has bias. The news values and codes I've learned in this class are not only for the U.S. journalists but also for reporters from all over the world. 

Truth, the core value of journalism, is the only thing the public wants to know and journalists seek. But because human beings are emotional, it is hard for reporters or other media workers to not show their emotions or bias when presenting truths. 

In this video, obviously, the producer shows bias against the western media. Is it true that western media always lie? Of course not. However, on one hand, western news that Chinese people can reach is limited and not all Chinese can read English, so videos or news articles like this could probably mislead people who watch or read them. 

On the other hand, western people who can reach things like this could probably think Chinese media lie. I personally think that the more the news like this comes out, the worse the relationships between countries will be. This is one of the reasons that I hesitated whether to learn journalism or not. 

Although journalistic values and codes changes over time, the news itself changes too. Nowadays, the purposes of many news articles are to cater to the public or to follow the requests of government; in some cases, new organizations even try to cover up the truth in order to "cooperate" with the government. 

Currently, in China lacking of rights to free speech makes things like this happen often. Sometimes news organizations may be forced by the government to delete a piece of truthful news within 24 hours after it is released since the news is in a way "harmful" to the government.

http://www.icmpa.umd.edu

Like the article about transparency of journalism in global media says, "'transparency' doesn't guarantee fair and accurate reporting," but as journalists, we still need to show transparency to the public since it is an important part of truth-seeking.

Besides transparency, there are still numerous difficulties for news workers to overcome on the way to  real journalism. The work we are doing is like a war, and the enemies we fight against are not only the government or greater powers but also ourselves.

In my opinion, the most important thing for a journalist to remember and to achieve is to always seek and report the truth to serve the public through transparency. Like this article says, "transparency is the answer to bad government and wrongdoing by corporations and news media...Let the 'sunshine' of transparency enter the public domain and watch these evil forces retreat."