Week 4: The Obligations of Journalists

            I thought that the group presentation was really well thought out, and it kept me interested the entire time.  I am usually against the upright bias that Fox News puts out, but this clip was actually a great one to show!  I find that trying to be the first news source to report something has caused news sources to decrease their overall level of accuracy, which is disheartening. 

I read two articles that have to dealt with journalism and dishonesty, sort of like the Bill  O’Reilly video that we watched during the presentation.  The first one is located here: http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=598 .  It talks about the dishonesty of recent journalism/news and gives some great insight on the subject!

The second article that I read has to do with the topic of Fox News, except this one is directly criticizing Fox News and their “dishonest charts”.  The url is here: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CEYQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmediamatters.org%2Fblog%2F2011%2F12%2F12%2Ftoday-in-dishonest-fox-news-charts%2F185162&ei=nq5MUt6UNaeYigKii4CQDg&usg=AFQjCNHsrs9onJLa50epo3Q8zRXLceHqwg&sig2=oVPllE98L9g42EXkUQTM4Q&bvm=bv.53537100,d.cGE .  Apparently Fox News is famous for being dishonest in their graphical representations of news.  This article illustrates how Fox changes the data on the x or y-axis in order to emphasize certain points that they are trying to push.

All news outlets to this to some point, none of them are entirely “objective”.  All news leans either left or right, and it’s impossible for news to sit perfectly in the middle.  Unfortunately bias has become the standard, and it’s something that I wish wasn’t true.  If I go on to become a journalist instead of a producer (my current plan), I hope to change some of this and provide news that is actually objective.  Like the guest speaker last week said (his name slips my mind at the moment), we can try our best to be objective, but we are human beings and our opinions will show through sometimes no matter what we try to do.