Media and Journalism: The Changing Game, Essay Example

Michael Bujega’s article, “Stewart, Assange, and Journalism Education”,  is aimed at those interested in journalistic integrity.   It seeks to warn them that, given the mass proliferation of opinion and questionable information produced by the Internet, the core values which traditionally guided journalism pursuits are fading, if not gone. Schools are changing the names of their journalism programs to reflect greater “media” concerns, and Bujega sees even this as dangerously careless. Then, and more importantly, he asserts that marketing and promotional considerations have rendered Internet news outlets little more than after-the-fact commentators, or sources of unprofessional and invalid journalism.    All of this, he indicates, must go to destroying the real educational purposes American journalism has always been in place to provide.

Bujega’s points are hard to refute. Moreover, his thrust is not one typically heard, even as people increasingly mock the vast array of “news sources” they continually visit online or on television. Bujega is right: Google is an empire which enjoys enormous profits through an incessant streamlining of news that costs it nothing to convey. As the profit margins increase with the introduction of each new hand-held device, the substance of what is being reported declines. There seems, in fact, to be a hidden audience for Bujega’s concern, one composed of all the potential journalists who will never know the correct nature of the work they take on. As the media have so drastically altered the substance of news, this essential component for an educated democracy will be lost.

Unfortunately, the author fails to take into account two greatly influential factors in the circumstances he finds so distressing.   The first regards his single-minded assault on Internet capabilities as destructive to credible journalism. Bujega views technology as taking on too much substantive import, and this is a very reasonable concern; the media truly is becoming the message, in modern life.   However, the decline in standards of journalism cannot be blamed upon the advent of the technology. For decades before the Internet gained prominence, there was a visible and increasing shift in how news was presented to the public, and one perhaps fueled by the same, populist agendas which drive the online media experiences. That is to say, since television became a news source and began to be a fierce competitor to print journalism, even the most respected newspapers began moving away from the reporting of fact to a far more editorialized presentation. The appeal of television anchors, along with the necessarily more casual, or less complex, manner in which they related the news in people’s homes, translated to the threat of extinction for the dry, fact-filled newspaper pages. The response was for these newspapers to generate an appeal of their own, and editorial viewpoints and slant were suddenly permitted within front page stories.

The trend was growing and obvious, and existing newspapers today largely reflect it.  In traditional journalism, there is a careful avoidance of the subjective, or personal, and the finest journalists of the past prided themselves on presenting only the established facts. Descriptive adjectives were for the back pages, as were even the most justifiable conclusions.   That mode of reporting ended long ago, as top stories are introduced nearly in the manner of narrative fiction, in order to capture reader interest.   Technology may well have vastly expedited this decline, but the technology predates the Internet.   It was television that began the fall of standards, and it was and is the journalists who permit it.

Secondly, Bujega understandably shies away from an interesting dilemma, or evolution, born from this very technology: namely, how can responsible journalism exist in a world that appears to be uninterested in it? As Bujega himself alludes to, the public not only accepts this extraordinary influx of “information”, it is forever demanding more. The sources and validity of much of what is presented are at best questionable, but that does not diminish public appetite for it. If the people, then, are responding to Internet media as actual news, the picture is truly disastrous. This then goes to the greater question of, not whether the Internet news sources are irresponsibly dumping specious material on the public, but whether or not the public truly considers any or all of this to be trustworthy news.

Google is probably not going anywhere but up, as are the other giants in the Internet arenas. The mistake Bujega makes, however, is in assuming that the public is completely accepting of all this material as fact. They cannot, simply because the proposition is too blatantly unrealistic.   A kind of wariness has emerged in the modern Internet user because they know just how vast and unreliable much of the input is.   This is, in fact, an interesting consequence of the inherently interactive nature of the Internet experience; as people are wholly empowered to dictate the what and when of their media, they seem also to be exercising a necessary cynicism about much of it.  The enormity of Internet media has, ironically, created within the public a kind of defense mechanism, and few users today are naïve enough to believe that most of what they read online can be trusted as fact.

This does not address Bujega’s main concern regarding the decline of journalism instruction.  It should, however, be an element within his concern. Today’s media has changed journalism, yet the public is by no means the purely receptive one it once was, either.  The entire playing field has changed, but it has leveled as well, and serious journalism may still occupy the place in society it once did. All it needs to do is what it used to do, and it will be recognized and valued as such, even in the midst of the Internet.