How Young Journalists are Shaping the Future
There is a not so fine line between opinion and fact. And these days the line is becoming unclear to many young journalists.
As journalists, from the creation of news reporting and writing, we have all signed an unwritten contract saying we will report only the facts while staying honest and objective to the truth. Unbiased is a journalists middle name, or so we’ve been taught. But are young journalists taking advantage of our beloved freedom of the press by pushing their own agendas? Are we losing the trust of the readers by demanding change from our articles?
Over the years our contract has been pushed aside while our opinions and political views have taken over almost half of America’s daily news vitamins. Most attempts of straying from biased remarks and sticking to the facts have failed. And in this year particularly, we’ve started to see why.
On February 14th of 2018, a 19 year old gunman opened fire at Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 students and staff. This tragic event was called the biggest high school shooting since Columbine in 1999. Unfortunately, it was not the only shooting to occur this year, however it was the first shooting where the students who experienced the tragedy actually had a voice.
Student Journalists of Majory Stoneman Douglas High, were encouraged to tell their stories. The young journalists conducted interviews with their well known classmates and shared their voices of what they witnessed and how they felt. All was going well until Co-editor and chief of the thier schools newspaper, Rebecca Schneid, announced her opinions about activism and journalism on live television this past March.
Established reporters responded quickly to the remarks, many opposing that Schneid’s belief that the two concepts pair together seamlessly.
Although Schneid’s enthusiasm and desire for change was inspiring to the people, the question still has yet to be answered. Is journalism activism?
John Roche, journalism professor at Western Connecticut State University and former journalist, shared his opinion on the matter. He said, “To me, journalism is presenting facts as accurately and objectively as possible” and he does not believe that “straight journalism is a form of activism”.
However, “there’s a lot of partisan press, editorializing and propaganda disguising itself as objective news” Roche says.
Journalists continue to debate if it is possible that their profession could be linked with activism. The one thing that always seemed to be consistent with the truth was turning into quite the opposite. Frequent readers of the news are finding it harder and harder to trust local and global news sources based on the bias that is frequently cast in reports.
Younger generations are consuming their news through social media platforms like twitter, snapchat and news apps now-a-days. While older generations mostly still rely on their ‘trusted’ news stations. However, most of these stations have taken a new platform on social media, television, and other ways to immediately notify viewers on live news updates. In other words, the news is literally everywhere now-a-days.
“The public mistrust of journalism will lead to either a complete crash of journalism, and then a rebuild, or a slow makeover as journalism continues to look at itself in the mirror and figures out what to fix”
There’s a problem with spilling our thoughts into our newspapers and it’s because there is no way to fact check a writer’s opinions. Yes, deep in the back of every journalists mind, a little piece of us hopes that change will come from publishing articles. But a good journalist accomplishes this by sharing the truth along with the facts and all they can do from there is hope someone reads beyond that.
The news today has clearly changed from newspaper boys on bikes delivering the paper to our doorsteps, but the idea behind the news should remain the same.
The job of a journalist is to report the facts. It’s important for these young journalists to stay objective when sharing their stories because by starting this habit early on in a journalists career, it could essentially lead to mistakes in the workforce.
Roche believes, “if a reporter is supposed to be writing an objective story and instead twist or shape it with bias they can and probably should be fired”. And in many cases, they will be fired. “We’re human, after all, and sometimes our own beliefs or ignorance can sneak into a story”, Roche says.
Opinions do matter, and in some ways activism has been brought into the world of journalism but there is a difference between reporting perspectives of the people, and reporting your own agenda. Staying unbiased is the key to getting people to read your articles.
Everyone wants to believe they’re right, so let them be right. Let them form their own opinions based on the truths you’ve put on paper and we, the young journalists, will sit and hope that activism will rise from the facts.