Troubling events in Journalism

PodCast here!

There are a couple of troubling events, or at least to me they are troubling events, having to do with Journalism or supposed Journalism. I am sure you have heard it a thousand times by now but the story of the question asked of students of Journalism. The questions is why do you want to be a Journalist. The vast majority answered "I want to change the world and/or help the world" NARK!! Wrong answer! Journalism is not about changing the world or helping anybody. Its about reporting what has happened to someone who was not there and interested in what happened. Even Wikipedia which gets sooo much wrong gets this right! They state that Journalism is the investigation and reporting of events, issues, and trends to a broad audience.

A troubling event has been happening very subtly and slowly and it concerns Fox news, as the supposed bastion of "Fair and balanced reporting", they were known for getting the facts in and letting us decide why it happened, however more and more I hear and watch the reporters ending the story with their "take" or "speculation" on why or what just happened. In getting so used to the main street media doing this for 40 years it does not always raise an eyebrow, but I have been catching it more and more. That coupled with a couple of the Main anchors not understanding or correctly reading an item and going off half cocked about it leaves me to wonder when they fall off the Fair and Balanced beam, where do we get unbiased news?

First I was not born yesterday, and I know that the main commentators on Fox are not Fair and balanced and they don't have to be. I am talking about the reporting of the news items themselves. It seems to be a no-brainer, Who, What, When, Where and leave the Why to the Viewer and the Commentators. What is it with reporters who just have to end a news story with their own commentary? You want to comment? Get a commentators job! My problem is that with the average public so used to hearing commentary ending every story on all the other networks, they might not notice it creeping back in again. The next time you watch Fox pay attention to the reporting and see if you can spot the end of story tag line commentary! Where will we go if Fox will not deliver Fair and Balanced reporting? Commentary we can get anywhere.

Second item is what is happening in Canada our Socialist neighbor to the north. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled Friday that journalists do not have a blanket right to shield confidential sources! This is very disturbing as it basically is another power grab by the Canadian Government. Here is what I mean. This ruling stems from an National Post article by former reporter Andrew McIntosh. They attempted to quash a search warrant issued in a case dealing with a possibly forged document from a secret source linked to a political scandal. Justice Ian Binnie writing on the court's behalf said that in this situation, the needs of a police investigation trumped the right to keep sources confidential. WhoAA!! The needs of an investigation, this time in a political situation, trumped the secret source!

Why does this have anything to do with us? If you remember a few years ago the furor over the idea of looking at other Countries statutes and using that to define our own, sometimes what happens in other countries can affect us here in the US. The journalists are supposed be a kind of watchdog over us. They report and investigate and sometimes bring items to light that may have never been shown that light without them. That is why it is important for a free society to have protections to let legitimate journalists keep their sources secret. There needs to be some limits on just what a government can do in the investigation of any crimes lest we fall into that soup of despotism.

I know there are differing views on this but a free press should be protected at almost all costs. This then underlines what I was talking about in the first part of this blog. If the journalists are to be believed and trusted, they need to leave the commentary to the commentators and out of the news casts themselves.  They need to have their secret sources for investigations as well.  I hope Fox does not end up like the rest of the mainstream press today.