Journalism: The professional Priesthood?

Comic will be explained later on (oh, and in case you can't read it, the kid in bed represents "democracy" and the light represents "newspapers".

At first, like the group that presented, I was a bit put off by the book's claim that journalists carried out a professional priesthood. It did seem slightly sacrilegious to me. But I really liked how the group defined this term: "taking on the responsibility of surrendering to a higher calling-- serving others." While I don't think journalism is necessarily a divine calling, requiring the actual Priesthood, I do agree that when a person takes on the title of "journalist" he or she is surrendering his or her own needs to the greater good, to serve others.

I've always thought that this is true; it's one of the reasons why I think the news media is so important. I don't think we could live in a free democracy without the free press that we have today. I feel like journalists do a great service simply because the people are really the only people journalists owe loyalty to. The only reason for the news media to exist at all is to inform the public so they might make educated decisions. The cartoon shown above really hit me because it really showed me how vital a free press is to the survival of democracy. We really do have a "calling" whether it's divine or just a practical function of freedom, it's vital.

Tonight at my internship with ABC 4, I went out on a story and had an interesting experience with the concept of "Separation" as discussed in class on Thursday. We were covering a story about a girl who had been shot by accident by her 14-year-old aunt with a BB Gun. She was in intensive care in the hospital at the time when we aired the story and shot our live shot outside the hospital. Right after the reporter finished her package live intro and tag, she left, and the little girl's grandmother came over to me and the photographer and asked if we would like to hear the whole story for her. She wanted to do what she could to spread the word about this awful accident so it could be prevented in the future. As she was telling the very sad story, I found myself almost tearful. I was truly moved by the love she feels for her little grand-daughter. And I found myself subconsciously involved emotionally in the story. How do I stay separated enough to be neutral, but remain human enough to connect with my viewers? It's a fine, fine line we journalists have to walk. I'm including the link for the web-version of the story; what do you think? How objective should the journalist be when talking to a family member about this?

Finally, I want to address the newest concept for me that was included in the presentation last Thursday: Worldview. I found an interesting article from the school paper at the University of Washington that said that biases are inevitable in journalism, so instead of running away from them and striving for objectivity, we should embrace them. It said that even in how journalists arrange their facts, they put a little bit of their worldview into everything. To me, worldview is a person's fundamental outlook on all aspects of life, derived from early childhood and maintained by their immediate environment. I think journalists are like ordinary people with their own worldviews.

However, I also think that when "on the job" it is our responsibility to strive for a broader more encompassing worldview, so we can relate to more people on different levels of communication. Instead of just being concerned with our immediate "bubble", we have to be concerned with all that goes on that affects our readers, viewers, and listeners. To do this, we have to have a greater understanding of people in general. I found a really good quote in a Nieman Report article that sums up, in my opinion, why journalists must expand their worldviews:

"If we don’t understand how they see the world, if we can’t empathize with each person’s need to grasp a human problem in language of his or her worldview, then we will likely fail to reach many Christian conservatives who have a sense of morality and justice as strong as our own."