One Small Step for Reporting, One Giant Leap for the Faith of the Media

Jessica Deyo

Jd922016@ohio.edu

As children, we all giggled while we asked to do a trust fall with our friends. If you were in the majority, you would very slowly start to fall backwards, but there is no way you would have fallen without hesitation. Why? Trusting someone is hard. Trust means vulnerability and if there is nobody there to catch us when we fall, it’s hard to want to be vulnerable.

Trusting the media entails the same analogy. For the majority of us, we check our phones and social media by the hour for the latest information and updates for our entertainment, knowledge and safety. Access to a credible news source is the only way to stay informed, so what happens when unethical reporting intercepts our ability to fall back on the media?

Image courtesy of John Cole, The Times-Tribune

According to The Hill, two-thirds of a poll of 4,000 adults believe that people will report fake news in order to keep up with their agendas. One-third agreed that poor reporting is credited to laziness and failure to properly fact check. These numbers speak for themselves.

As a journalism student myself, I’m not going to bash the credibility of the people I look up to the most, but I can admit there is much room for improvement for many reporters. Today, reporters are scrambling to be the first to release a story, stressing about meeting high expectations, and cramming to meet an agenda. In my opinion, there are two faults here: failure to take time to accurately tell a story, and failure to honor integrity. These two factors combined make for an extremely unethical concoction.

In a field as competitive as reporting, I understand why it may appear better to get the story out before anyone else, but if that message is wrong, your credibility is gone. Society will never slow down, but storytellers could benefit from a change of pace. One that allows for more time to fact check, spell check and gather more information. Frankly, even without extra time, it would look better to get a story out later than other sources, while offering more information, than to have questionable details thrown on the web minutes after something happened. I understand that reporters typically have the best intentions, but devoting just a little more time to each story could mean so much to readers trust in the media.

The second fault in reporting is the question of journalistic integrity. How much do reporters value professionalism, objectivity and accuracy, and how does it impact their writing? Too often, opinions became laced in news and the line between what is hard news and what is an opinion piece are totally blurred, which in turn lowers society’s trust for the media.

While I agree that journalists should remain objective unless asked to write their opinion, and that some do not remain that way, I also believe that labeling articles by category would clear up confusion about the purpose of the story. 

In this report by Poynter, helpful suggestions are given, like labeling all articles with clear and specific words that are easily seen to avoid confusion. The report also proved that oftentimes, there are labels like “local news” and “sports,” but those are not enough to guide readers. After all, if readers are left to categorize information on their own, who knows what they would label it and how that would affect their trust in the media?

In short, the media has easily reversible faults that start with slowing down, remaining objective and making small but effective tweaks to guide readers in the right direction. If reporters go back to the roots of storytelling, media trust could be restored.