mk428915@ohio.edu
The world is changing at a rapid rate, that only grows more rapid every single day due to widespread globalization thanks, in part, to social media. And in the United States, social media is now even having a major effect on politics. President Trump frequently bombards social media, especially Twitter, with rants about various topics. One of major concern is his slamming journalists day in and day out. Because of Trump's war on free speech, and because of social media on a whole, journalism has begun to change. No longer is journalism the black and white, straightforward, systematic machine that it once was. Journalism today has begun to allow for some subjectivity and opinion--even in the hardest of news.
Courtesy of https://www.thestranger.com/
A lot of the subjectivity that can be found from some of the largest news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, is to simply defend journalism itself. When the President of the United States is the biggest attacker of journalism and free speech, it is only at the cost of objective, facts-only reporting that a strong defense of freedom of speech can be made. And the big news media companies would rather keep their industry afloat, than maintain purity-- and understandably so. However, other, more right leaning news outlets have the President on their side, yet they still fail to remain objective. An argument can definitely be made that the more conservative news are just trying to fight back at the left, who is becoming less subjective, but looking at a Pew Research Study conducted last year, it is clear that the right-leaning news cite 2+ sources significantly less than the left. In fact, most of the news stations studied that had a more right winged audience mostly used 1 source type or none at all. So what replaces all of the airtime that facts and sources used to hold? Opinions, opinions, opinions. In fact, only 45% of Fox News broadcasting was labelled as 'factual reporting,' leaving 55% for opinion and commentary. But the left leaning broadcasters are not innocent. MSNBC was far worse with 85% opinion and only 15% factual content, according to a Business Insider story. The reason for the surge in commentary and the decline of actual news broadcasting is a combination of "the 24 hour news cycle, the need to limit costs, and the need to arouse emotion to keep audiences locked in," Matthew Nisbet said in his article on the Big Think. Advertising is how TV stations make their money after all, so it is important to hold an audience. But doing so at the expense of the truth is hard for any real journalist to see.
While commentary and opinion is continuing to increase on media outlets, there are still some holdouts. Politico, for example, will not even hire someone if their social media accounts show a partisan slant. "We are deliberately nonpartisan in the kind of journalism that we pursue," Sudeep Reddy, a managing editor at Politico said. And this is very good news for journalism and journalists worldwide. Because at the end of the day, all a reporter has are his word, so in the modern era more than ever, it is imperative for journalists to maintain their ethical standards and report the truth and only the truth to the best of their ability.
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