Journalism
Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy.
Arguments include the fact that journalists produce news out of and as part of a particular social context, and that they are guided by professional codes of ethics and do their best to represent all legitimate points of view.
In a 2014 study of journalists in the United States, 40% of participants claimed they rely on social media as a source, with over 20% depending on microblogs to collect facts.
[12] From this, the conclusion can be drawn that breaking news nowadays often stems from user-generated content, including videos and pictures posted online in social media.
[13] Consequently, this has resulted in arguments to reconsider journalism as a process distributed among many authors, including the socially mediating public, rather than as individual products and articles written by dedicated journalists.
Its news feed algorithm, in particular, was identified by Vox as the platform where the social media giant exercise billions of editorial decisions every day.
[18] Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has acknowledged the company's role in this problem: in a testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing on 20 April 2018, he said:It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.
The phrase was popularized and used by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign to discredit what he perceived as negative news coverage of his candidacy and then the presidency.
[20] In some countries, including Turkey,[21] Egypt,[22] India,[23] Bangladesh,[24] Iran,[25] Nigeria,[26] Ethiopia,[27] Kenya,[28] Cote d’Ivoire,[29] Montenegro,[30] Kazakhstan,[31] Azerbaijan,[32] Malaysia,[33] Singapore,[34] Philippines,[35] and Somalia[36] journalists have been threatened or arrested for allegedly spreading fake news about the COVID-19 pandemic.
As mass-printing technologies like the printing press spread, newspapers were established to provide increasingly literate audiences with the news.
[42] Johann Carolus's Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, published in 1605 in Strasbourg, is often recognized as the first newspaper in Europe.
[49] In France, political newspapers sprang up during the French Revolution, with L'Ami du peuple, edited by Jean-Paul Marat, playing a particularly famous role in arguing for the rights of the revolutionary lower classes.
Napoleon would reintroduce strict censorship laws in 1800, but after his reign print publications would flourish and play an important role in political culture.
[50] As part of the Revolutions of 1848, radical liberal publications such as the Rheinische Zeitung, Pesti Hírlap, and Morgenbladet would motivate people toward deposing the aristocratic governments of Central Europe.
The overthrow of the old imperial regime in 1911 produced a surge in Chinese nationalism, an end to censorship, and a demand for professional, nation-wide journalism.
The major postwar success story was Paris Soir; which lacked any political agenda and was dedicated to providing a mix of sensational reporting to aid circulation, and serious articles to build prestige.
[58] By 1900 popular journalism in Britain aimed at the largest possible audience, including the working class, had proven a success and made its profits through advertising.
[60] Described as "the scoop of the century", as a rookie journalist for The Daily Telegraph in 1939 Clare Hollingworth was the first to report the outbreak of World War II.
[citation needed] The late 19th and early 20th century in the United States saw the advent of media empires controlled by the likes of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
[64] Newspapers of this era embraced sensationalized reporting and larger headline typefaces and layouts, a style that would become dubbed "yellow journalism".
[65] This era saw the establishment of freedom of the press as a legal norm, as President Theodore Roosevelt tried and failed to sue newspapers for reporting corruption in his handling of the purchase of the Panama Canal.
[73] In the 1920s in the United States, as newspapers dropped their blatant partisanship in search of new subscribers, political analyst Walter Lippmann and philosopher John Dewey debated the role of journalism in a democracy.
Lippmann's views prevailed for decades, helping to bolster the Progressives' confidence in decision-making by experts, with the general public standing by.
The era of live-TV news coverage would begin in the 1960s with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, broadcast and reported to live on a variety of nationally syndicated television channels.
The role and status of journalism, as well as mass media, has undergone changes over the last two decades, together with the advancement of digital technology and publication of news on the Internet.
This has created a shift in the consumption of print media channels, as people increasingly consume news through e-readers, smartphones, and other electronic devices.
[89] Their view is that journalism's first loyalty is to the citizenry and that journalists are thus obliged to tell the truth and must serve as an independent monitor of powerful individuals and institutions within society.
Some journalistic Codes of Ethics, notably the European ones,[90] also include a concern with discriminatory references in news based on race, religion, sexual orientation, and physical or mental disabilities.
[91][92][93][94] The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe approved in 1993 Resolution 1003 on the Ethics of Journalism which recommends journalists to respect the presumption of innocence, in particular in cases that are still sub judice.
[96] Journalism does not have a universal code of conduct; individuals are not legally obliged to follow a certain set of rules like a doctor or a lawyer does.
