When Journalists get too Involved

Justin McCauley
jm257310@ohio.edu

I was sitting in my apartment on Court street in Athens, OH when I was scrolling through twitter and saw my twitter feed blowing up from journalists tweeting about all that was happening in Ferguson, MO. I follow several journalists and news outlets on twitter just like every aspiring journalist does and so most of my news about what was happening there from the original incident and what happen after was from the journalists I follow on twitter and what they retweeted. I didn't think twice about what was going on until that day when fellow Bobcat and alum Wesley Lowry got arrested.

Photographer Scott Olsen getting arrested by Ferguson Police officers

Journalists Objectivity

It was at that moment that I realized I should look into what was going on not just what my twitter feed was telling me. What I discovered was that: 1) something terrible was happening in that city and it was sad 2) The reporters that I was following were slowly losing their objectivity. No one will ever really know what actually happen and whats the truth of why the police arrested those journalists. So in the article written by Politico  saying that some of the journalists who were there in Ferguson, MO got into the story they were trying to tell.

Losing the Code

While journalists use and are protected by the first amendment they also seem to have forgotten about the code of ethics that they abide by. In the day and age of "information now" where we want to know about things happen as it is happening. With journalist doing that you get information quickly but as shown by the Occupy Wall Street that other people or the cops look at those social media sites to get people in trouble. It breaks codes of ethics such as: minimize harm, seek truth and report it just to name a few.

I have never been in a situation remotely close to what the reporters were in during the Ferguson events. I know that the longer that the media and the more that showed up in Ferguson, the angrier the people of Ferguson got. Its our duty to tell a story but with technology everyone is a journalist. What separates us from everyone is that code of ethics that we follow and how objective we seem to remain. When 75% of Americans say that journalists cant get their facts right how are you suppose to trust them.

Now the Ferguson situation is the first of my generation like it but not the first in history and the paid media, the journalists are there to tell the correct story, the honest story but by not recognizing what might happen if you tweet something you see or losing your objectivity because of things you see. That what makes us (journalists) and people with smart phones different. It is our duty to uphold that trust of the people that we cover. The moment that we lose that trust is the moment that you need to consider a new job.