Falling of journalism
Modern day journalism is in a state of confusion and disarray. It seems it’s all about images rather than facts.
Facts are no longer the real issue anymore. Instead glamour and image seem to be the deciding factor for what is newsworthy.
Corporations seem to be bartering the facts for image to gain profit.
News anchors and on-camera reporters look more like beauty queens and caricatures of talk show hosts rather than journalists.
Corporations are ruining honest journalism.
Britney Spears shaving her head and claims of Obama being a Muslim has been all over the news.
The news should focus more on the real issues such as rising gas prices, global warming, homelessness and issues that really matter.
For instance, consider the current election. How much of the media’s portrayal of the election is really about the election? Rather, it’s about the candidate’s social lives and their religious backgrounds. It shouldn’t be this way.
Much of television news panders to the audience rather than leading them.
The media’s first job should be to make interesting what is important.
News is progressively becoming more commercialized, leaving truth in the dust.
Power is moving away from journalists as gatekeepers of what the public knows.
Because reporting the news has become more of an entertainment, journalists are more capable of straying from the truth. Americans beware. There is a thin line woven between truth and reality.
News today is nothing like it should be.
The 1960s and 1970s were the crest of the journalistic revolution that swept America.
In those days journalists were the eyes and ears of the public. They took their jobs seriously uncovering the scandals and facts that Americans wanted and needed to know.
Journalists should be more like Hunter S. Thompson, who focused more on raw facts, giving Americans the unbiased truth.
Thompson believed questioning authority was the key to obtaining an honest truth.
“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours,” Thompson said in his novel, “Fear and Loathing in America.”
Thompson had it right.
His beliefs on questioning everything led him to the honest truth. That is how it should be.
As people we should always question what we can.
Rather than accepting everything as fact, truth must be sought out.
Truth is discovered, not given.
—Matt Mongomery
Staff Writer
