Blog Post 8

 Oh did this chapter scream relevancy at me this week. While doing my reading I came upon the section of the chapter aimed at interviews and how journalists could deceive or trick their audience by using them. At first I chuckled. What a strange point, I had never seen interviews as anything less than standard journalism. How could they have been so incendiary in the past? As if the universe heard me, my question was soon answered, specifically by this interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNK-e6nnFGY

I was floored by the media ethics exhibited in this interview of activist Suey Park by Josh Zepp for Huffington Post. Zepp is questioning Suey on her recent efforts to raise awareness on the #cancelcolbert hastag in response to a racially charged tweet. Zepp manipulates Park into looking emotional and illogical. He frames his questions condescendingly and jeers at her answers, even at one point explicitly calling her opinion “stupid”. Soon the public was on board, calling Park foolish and overly sensitive. Those that get their news specifically from sites like HuffPo and the like took to the Internet to bash Park and I formed another connection with the book. The importance of where we get our news is completely exacerbated by things like this.

Another point that I’ve experience in my everyday life lately is that of citizen journalists. One of my close friends from high school consistently posts his ‘articles’ the he writes for the online magazine Vice. He has yet to graduate from college but touts himself as a journalist writing on the social media injustices of today. His work is published by the company and passed off as newsworthy. While Vice may not be the shining paragon of journalism it is still a pretty high profile company with a solid following. What they publish is taken at face value a majority of the time. What scares me is their recent foray into actual ‘hard hitting news’ with the beginning of a segment called (creatively) Vice News. In my opinion, I find it hard to take the articles and videos posted by Vice News as legitimate when I see people like my 19-year-old, pot head high school classmates also legally associated with them as well.

Don’t get me wrong I think citizen journalism can be an incredibly important and valuable tool to society but it straddles a dangerous line. Those that follow news sources that utilize it have to worry about things like story legitimacy (dealing with sourcing issues as mentioned in the reading) as well as things like the ethics and what should be the “objectivity” behind it. Without following several legitimate news sources that follow traditional journalism tenets and employ traditionally trained journalists, the public risks losing touch with what is really going on.