It’s tough trying to discern what is and isn’t real journalism in 2018, yet democracy demands a citizen endeavor to be as informed as possible to assume the freedom of educated voting.
Journalism is widely defined. My thoughts are largely shaped by my master’s degree training from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York. After that, I was a television news reporter in Detroit, in St. Louis and at CNN in New York City before working 20 years in corporate media training, and nobody ever completely agreed on this topic.
Classically, news should be “new” – something you didn’t know before but now need to know. When I was a news reporter, I always said to myself, “Hey, I’m going to find out what’s going on today while you’re busy at work and tell you on the news tonight.”
Journalists have a responsibility to be honest and fair. A reporter should not go into any story with a preset point of view unless he or she can prove it. We are to be inquisitive about things you want to know. Good journalism should also affect the most people to be relevant. The six “Big C’s” are important: crime, corruption, catastrophe, chaos, competition and color. Then there are the “three H’s”: health, handbag, heart – because we are all concerned about staying alive, having enough money to pay bills and enjoying stories that affect our emotions.
Then, there’s “breaking news” – in my opinion, the most overhyped term on TV news today. Real breaking news is 9/11, a Syrian airstrike, a wildfire, a mass murder, a plane crash. But when a morning cable TV anchor says, “Breaking news! The Fed is considering raising rates in discussions today,” in my opinion, no, that’s not breaking news. That’s just an effort to grab the increasingly short attention span of a public overloaded by news choices in the 24/7 cycle – a TV station versus your phone. The danger of breaking news becoming a cliché is public inaction when a real crisis occurs.
Most of all, journalists should be “explainers of complicated issues,” a phrase Prof. Fred Friendly, the former president of CBS News, had printed on a card he gave to each of his Columbia students. (I still have mine.) But few reporters can do that in 2018. Digging doesn’t break fast enough when you’re running your own camera and have six live shots to fill per day! But the best keep trying.
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