I feel like journalists learn a lot of things in college, some of which are valuable. Writing skills are perhaps even more important when you must work within constraints, and social media frequently have such constraints. Ethics are worthwhile to learn. A news outlet as an organization that really exists and its journalists have real desks means there is some accountability, some threat of backlash if the journalist lies / libels / is just shitty.
In some ways, journalism is becoming what it used to be in America. Before, you had a dozen or two newspapers in a big city, all heavily biased and printed by individuals and small groups. You were supposed to read a few papers and get a well-rounded understanding of everyone's biased reporting, which sometimes led you to understand the truth of the matter.
Then we saw aggregation of newspapers into single companies, sometimes spanning whole markets, and the same companies aggregating other media like billboards, magazines, TV stations, radio stations, etc. This horizontal monopolization (accumulating a lot of newspapers and controlling the message across geographical areas) and vertical monopolization (accumulating other media and controlling the message across various media experiences) resulted in far fewer messages being produced. So that people didn't feel betrayed and abandoned, the concept of neutral journalism emerged. This was the idea that one newspaper could offer a balanced, perhaps multiple, views on a subject and give you the truth of a matter. Frequently that failed, and many news media outlets became known for biased reporting (Fox News, etc.).
A journalist must have access. This often compromises their attempted neutrality. If you're known as the reporter who busts open stories that ruin people's businesses, how many businesses are going to want to let you past the gates? If you're known as the interviewer who browbeats the guest and sends them running away in tears, and cuts the interview to put the story in a light unfavorable to the guest, how many people will be willing to talk?
Large businesses and their owners are inherently conservative in the sense of American Republicanism - they desire unregulated markets, no government competitors, easing of monopoly restrictions, low taxes on business and the wealthy, and favorable regulation in other areas (labor law, workers' compensation, environmental, zoning, etc.). There are some news outlets with a more American Democratic message, but the needs of that business are still catered to by Republican ideals, so it's hard to make the public believe they are truly unwilling to be proponents of those ideals. This is despite the common argument that newspapers are inherently liberal, and claims by conservatives that newspapers are a haven for liberal ideals. It's a complex and strange sociological pattern that you can probably boil down to doublespeak without losing much fidelity.
As the US government and big media conglomerates joined hands to control messages, people began to feel that not only were American news outlets biased but also corrupt. No longer could you get the important news from an American source without heavy big business / American government / conservative bias. People turned to exterior news sources like BBC and Al-Jazeera. But what are the biases of these news outlets? Are there unbiased news sources that still have funding and access necessary to find out what's going on?
So we see a shift toward social media journalism. Lower quality, heavily biased, no accountability - but with so many sources, you can read many of them and get a general sense of what's going on, and approach the truth. Of course this requires, as it did before, that you read stories written by journalists who have clearly opposing viewpoints. If you stay within your echo-chamber comfort zone you will be even more misinformed than if you didn't read the news at all.
If we can just get this shift to go toward small-time training for journalists, improving their quality individually, I think we can see something very cool happen. But I think we're not going back to the heyday of investigative journalism anytime soon.
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Topic: Bay12 Election Night Watch Party (Read 836520 times)