Silver Barker
sb230419@ohio.edu
The controversial question that remains a troubling topic for many in today's world is the essential principles needed to be a journalist. To even partially answer this question, people should first look at the term journalism and why we need it. Most of the general population would agree that journalism is meant to consistently inform our world of news we would not see or hear of in our personal day-to-day lives. We also rely on/expect someone with more authoritative power to act as the watchdog of these news events since we cannot scrutinize them due to external factors.
According to Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in their book The Elements of Journalism, "Journalism was for taking back the language from a government that had subverted it with propaganda that undermined freedom of thought itself."
Nowadays, the spectrum for a journalist has become wide-ranged due to our world's advancement in technology. This wide variety can range from some stranger on social media retweeting or sharing content they find "newsworthy" with their followers to a professional in a newsroom publishing daily content. To differentiate journalists from others, many will consider whether the person publishing this content is ethical and responsible. However, even this definition of journalists is too broad to distinguish the good apples from the bad apples because now it leaves people with the question of what someone believes to be ethical and what is not.
An excellent way to determine one's true intention behind publishing content is to look at how they contribute to society. As journalists, they have to report to the truth to prove their loyalty and earn/keep the people's trust. Unfortunately, the trust in journalists over the years has declined. Journalism should be viewed as another factor of democracy since it serves the public's interest. However, in 2011, 42 percent of the population felt the press hurt the democracy rather than helped it. The problem is that the political climate has had a severe outbreak due to social unrest that has silenced the voices of many journalists. A considerable part of this loyalty we require to earn the title journalist is not being afraid of speaking up and showing that a journalist's only obligation is to the people.
The wide accessibility for most individuals to get on a platform and start pointing fingers can make it easy to blame at whose fault it is for certain events such as the raid of the capital. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of autocracy, stated: "We are losing our democracy day by day, and journalists are individually aware of this, but media outlets are not centering this as the story it should be." This is an excellent point because it shows that while some people will argue that it does not matter whether you balance what you cover to be titled a journalist. It seems here that democracy must survive. Some people fail to realize that entitling yourself to be a journalist means you have the power to gatekeep what you would like for your consumers to know. With this being said, an empowering voice that reports the truth and carries some diversity in what they share is a journalist that can likely increase the chances of gaining that trust back from citizens and saving a democracy that is slowly diminishing.
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