Itap pretty simple to sum up the job of the journalist: Tell the truth. There’s a lot more that goes into the practice of good journalism, but being a truth-teller who doesn’t let their own biases taint the reporting is pretty much the prime directive for journalists. When we as individuals take it upon ourselves to post videos, blog about local topics or even just forward along such content, we’re acting in a journalistic capacity.
But do we really know what we’re doing?
These days, of course, we know journalism is in a tough place. The bedrock upon which newsgathering was built — the newspaper — is on shaky ground. Papers struggle to remain relevant in a smartphone world, even as so much of the news people consume on their devices is derived from traditional news sources like newspapers. News bureaus at TV stations and newspapers continue to scale back operations, with many struggling to stay in business with skeletal staffs. Many vanish altogether.
The expectation has become that news should be free, like Wi-Fi and water, and the younger you are, the more likely you are to balk at the notion of paying for it.
The advent of social live-streaming, which broke into the national consciousness recently in horrifying fashion, has some predicting the demise of the live TV broadcast as a way to disseminate breaking news. But are these impromptu citizen journalists really going to supplant the crew with a satellite truck?
Probably not. The trouble is, that kind of content doesn’t tell the whole story. Itap just a piece of the puzzle, often devoid of context and needing a fair amount of framing. If thatap all we consumed, we’d be the blind men inspecting different parts of an elephant and guessing at what we’re feeling. Relying only on what we see in that video clip is to see only one side of a story — and there’s never only one.
Online, the bar to publish is ridiculously low. While most of us know to take what we read on random blogs and sketchy sites with a big grain of salt, a more direct conduit of faux news, as old as the internet itself, presents a bigger problem: those forwarded “email-s from your uncle” reporting on the latest conspiracy or breathless “did you know?” factoid that, upon cursory inspection, reveals itself to be false.
You don’t have to be a journalist to take umbrage at these digital piles of flaming dog poop deposited in your inbox. I would suggest that, if you take it upon yourself to send such e-mails (or post such links), you have a basic obligation to ask one simple question before you click “send” or “post”: Is it true? Likewise, if you’re on the receiving end and blithely believe it or forward it, you’re abdicating a very basic tenet of what one might call “one-on-one journalism” — the practice of telling the truth to those around you.
It may be easy to block or avoid these unwanted intrusions from Conspiracy Land, but not always. If you’re like me, you may have at least one family member who’s doing this kind of thing, and they may occasional send items of genuine importance. There is, in my experience, no stopping the determined e-mail forwarder, but it can’t hurt to implore anyone who reads this to hold the yardstick of truth up to anything you post or send. Websites like Politifact and Snopes are a good place to start to help ensure that what you’re sending at least passes the sniff test.
The power to disseminate information to people is an awesome one, and if we’re going to become a nation of self-appointed journalists, adopting some semblance of ethical guidelines imposed upon ourselves seems like a good idea. Letap keep it simple: Tell the truth (fact-check) and scrub your e-mail list. In other words, don’t send junk to people who don’t want it.
Alex Miller is a former newspaper editor now working as a marketing writer and living in Highlands Ranch.
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