Should Journalists be Allowed to Share Their Opinions Via Social Media?

Alex Semancik

as477018@ohio.edu

In an ever-digitizing world, social media has become a vital part of communication and socializing for almost everyone. The way we are communicating is changing and doing so at an extremely rapid pace. The profession of journalism is a prime example of digitization as an increasing number of especially young individuals are getting their news from places like social media platforms and other websites or digital sources.

With that being said, sharing opinions on anything from a local sports team's performance to a polarizing partisan decision have become commonplace on social media platforms. Most people don't think much at all about posting their opinions on social media, but for a journalist posting the "wrong" opinion on social media could potentially cost them their career. 

Journalistic institutions like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, to name a few, have extremely strict policies on employees posting "partisan content" on their personal social medias, according to an article posted on the Columbia Journalism Review.

The fact of the matter is that journalists, however unbiased they may appear in their craft, are biased individuals who may have very strong opinions. The question becomes should they be allowed to show these biases on their social media accounts? There are two schools of thought. 

Source: Cision

One school of thought illustrated by Mathew Ingram, the author of the Columbia Journalism Review article, says that policies like that of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal banning partisan opinions will not achieve the goals those publishers hope they will. Most readers are at least partially aware that the content they are reading is not entirely unbiased anyways, so why would they care about a biased opinion on social media? 

Journalists should not have to lie or cloud their opinions behind a false sense of objectivity, in fact doing so may disconnect them further from their audiences. You build trust by being honest, not by pretending to have no opinions.

The other school of thought is presented by Dan Kennedy who wrote an article responding to Ingram's. Kennedy says that journalists are being paid to present information objectively and keep their opinion out of it. Fair coverage is undermined when journalists present their own biases.

An example is used about a reporter tweeting out "the governor is an idiot" and then being tasked with writing an article about that same governor later. How is the reader supposed to read that article objectively knowing about that tweet? 

The answer likely lies somewhere in the middle. Journalists should not be unbiased fact reporting robots that aren't allowed to have opinions and express them publicly, yet they should also work to maintain a professional and trustworthy reputation and not say rash or hurtful things on social media.