In the Public Interest: Public vs private

Has anyone tired of seeing news reports being distorted into entertainments? Has anyone realized that news reports concerning with human interest had suffered because of such reason? However, interesting enough, entertainments and journalism had went hand in hand for a long time. Thus, sensationalism in journalism was created as an important ingredient in news reports to stimulate public interest. As a result, events are seen as newsworthy when they are emotionally compelling and had intruded one’s privacy.

The duty of a journalist is to inform public on the events that are happening around them. However, problems will arise when the right of society to be informed had went against the right of individuals to privacy. Moreover, to make such problems more complicated, there is actually no clear-cut distinction between what is consider right and wrong when it comes to the issue of privacy and public interest. As a result, there are still possibilities of conflicts to rise when a journalist cover a story that touches on such areas. Therefore, in my opinion, a journalist should always question himself if he had intruded on a person’s personal life when writing or reporting on a story. For example, should a journalist approach grieving parents and conduct an interview with them about their murdered son? I think it is better not to. We had understood that news should be unusual and interesting, however, it is impossible for journalists to find an educational aspect to report every single story in the world of reality. Hence, I feel that no matter how interesting a news story can be, there must still have a dividing line between the type of news that the public has the right to know, and those for the individuals to keep private. For example, if a celebrity has some negative behaviour at his or her home, the media have no rights to report on it, as there is no possible negative effect on the celebrity’s public role. Such situation can be considered as invading a person’s privacy.

I understand that there is a need for companies to maintain their readerships and businesses. However, in recent years it seems that the drive for profits has completely overshadowed the public interest in reliable and informative news. As a whole and in my opinion, there should be a limit of sensitivity where it is important for the concern of individuals to be balanced with a journalist’s responsibility to inform the society as a whole. It is definitely not easy to define or maintain such balance, but being as a journalist, one has the responsibility to try.

Dependencies of Journalists have on Public Relations Practitioners

Both PR practitioners and media journalists depend on each other to complete their respective jobs and responsibilities. Journalists rely on PR practitioners for information and materials for their news reports, while PR practitioners can influence the news agenda that were given to the journalists. Hence, there must be mutual trust between both professions so as to produced reliable pieces of news for the public, which are favourable to the PR organizations as well.

Much portions of the information in the news reports that were published on newspapers and even broadcasted on Television were provided by the PR organizations and specialists, rather than solely discovered by the media journalists. Most journalists depend on the news information provided by the PR practitioners as supporting sources for their ‘raw materials’ and news drafts. These include the news articles, feature stories, bulletins, media releases and announcements. The reason is PR practitioners speak on behalf of the organizations/clients that they work for, and thus, they are the ones who are regarded as the gatekeepers of news information, and journalists need quotes and information from these clients of the PR practitioners. In addition, these information can be copied straight from the media releases given by the PR practitioners, and had definitely saved much of the journalists’ time and efforts on finding news sources to publish their news stories. In my opinion, I believe that such practices may not vary much for both large and small publishing firms, as large publishing firms need more news stories to report on, while small publishing firms may have fewer journalists or reporters to write for stories.

Furthermore, I too feel that when news information was provided for the journalists, this can reduce the possibilities of negative reports on the organizations that the PR practitioners are working for. The reason is journalists may be less likely to go look for their own news sources, which may bring negative publicity to the clients of the PR practitioners. Therefore, being as the primary writing source for journalists on their stories, PR practitioners can influence the contents of a story and how it was published. As a whole, I feel that both media journalists and PR practitioners have an interrelationship with each other, whereby journalists should recognize that PR practitioners are the gatekeepers of news information, and PR practitioners can help journalists accomplish their tasks by helping them with facts and figures checks, so that the journalists have the story right.

Truth & Objectivity

Journalists are human beings. They do have biases and different personal values that may bring into their professions unconsciously. Hence, after all the vigorous debates and callings on journalists should be objective when reporting news, maybe it is time to change this traditional journalism mindset to something more achievable? I would like to point out that being objective is still a goal; however, we can use other pillars of good journalism as replacement. They are accuracy, fairness, thoroughness and transparency. I feel that these four pillars are too, useful in the approaches to quality journalism, easier to achieve when writing news reports, and definitely bring journalists to a better platform in their professions in a long run.

Accuracy is definitely the easiest to achieve among the four, whereby journalists should get their facts straight and report information that is beyond their current knowledge. Next is fairness, which means listening to different viewpoints, and incorporating them into journalism. Fairness is also about allowing publics to feedback and willing to listen to those who disagree. However, I feel that this may be easier to follow for online than in a print publication, much less a broadcast. Further on, is thoroughness that means to gather readers for their inputs on a news story. The last pillar is transparency, whereby it means the ways journalists present a news story. They should link their stories with supportive sources and materials in the most possible ways, and inform publics with close-to-the-ground facts and data.

In my opinion, transparency can be the new face of objectivity and is now fulfilling some of objectivity’s old role in the ecology of journalism knowledge. The reason is transparency provides publics with information by which they can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases that they had read before from other sources. Moreover, transparency also means to back a specific assertion (objectivity) up by letting publics and readers to look at different sources, disagreements, and the feedbacks that are initially bracketed out of the report. On the other hand, the problem with objectivity is that we could not really define ‘objectivity’ after all! It only tries to show the publics/readers what the incident of stories look like from no particular point of view, just like looking something in the dark! Another way to convey my point on this is even a journalist reports on a news story with his defined ‘objectivity’ without imparting transparency, is just an exaggerated self-opinioned work piece! Why should we trust what one person — even if is with good intentions — accept is true when there are many other alternatives of evidence, ideas, and arguments provided by other people?

Hence, transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to. Nevertheless, objectivity is still considered as an unattainable goal — but yet, had served as an important role in the past on how we came to trust information, and in the current economics of newspapers in the modern world.