A Higher Calling..

I guess there are many reporters out there who are trying to show us what’s going on in our world, but there are few who I think do a good job about it. Don’t get me wrong I don’t have anything against the profession or for any of those who practice it, but I feel that sometimes many of the news or blogs we read are loaded with biased and uncompleted information. If we are so passionate about a certain subject and we go above and beyond to find the details, to unveil the truth, why is that that in many cases journalists just quit in the middle of the road and try to avoid the opinions and facts that oppose their point of view?

As we discussed in our class Journalist have to follow a code of ethics that is much higher and sometimes complicated than it may seem. They have to surrender to that higher calling to serve other and deliver complete and accurate information, but many failed to do this and tried to bend or hide parts of the truth. I think journalist have a lot of power in their hands because they are the gatekeepers of what is talked about or what is not; they decides what issues are important and which ones are not. Please don’t take this 100% literally but think about it, the everyday conversations that are carried around are motivated and moved by what the media is talking about and this is why journalists must use that power with integrity. I found an interesting quote by John Oldham an English poet that said “I wear my pen as others do their sword”. Words are powerful and with the help of the media that power is multiplied by millions.

Just to expand in my point of view I would like to share an article that I found about how journalists have failed in the financial crisis saying that journalists should have also been bailed out by the government the same way that all the people who was culpable for the financial crisis because they carry out a big part of that culpability. Some exert form the article Traditional Journalisms Failure in Financial crisis says:

“Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to covering the reckless behavior, sleaze and willful ignorance of fundamental economics, much of which was reasonably obvious to anyone who was paying attention, that inflated the housing and credit bubbles of the past decade. Their frequent cheerleading for bad practices — and near-total failure to warn us, repeatedly and relentlessly, of what was building — made a bad situation worse."

I am not going to put myself in any of the two sides of the story because even though I don’t completely agree with the article it really made me think about it. For this reason I leave it up to the reader to form their own opinion on this article and this particular issue.

Picture from Zazzle.com