A Note To News Journalist

Dear news journalist. For the most part, I don’t care what you think. If I wanted your thought, opinion, or agenda driven slant, then I would go to the Op/Ed’s or tune to a chat show.

What I do care about is your ability as a journalist to assimilate newsworthy information that is pertinent, requisite, truthful and verifiable. What I do care about is your capability to convey this information in a clear, concise, and comprehensive manner.

Do I expect you to be free of biases? Of course not. No one is. But I do expect your process for producing works of journalism to be pure, impartial, and free of prejudice. I do expect you to adhere to said process in every case, every time, without fail.

But if you must express your opinions, then please do so as works easily recognizable as such. Otherwise, if you inject personal preferences into your work, be it overtly or covertly, then you have left the realm of journalism and have entered into the world of propaganda.

Understand that if you do express your opinions as a journalist it will reveal your personal stripes to the public and you will forever be tainted in their eyes. Your journalistic integrity will never be the same. Your audience will be greatly divided between those of similar stripe who are adulate towards you, and all the rest, who will be quite splenetic.

The public has a degree of trust in what the journalist does. The public assumes that what you do is trustworthy. They will believe your work because they believe that you adhere to that higher standard involved in the journalistic process. This is why it is so crushing for the public to discover that some of their favorite journalist and news outlets are nothing short of being propagandist. You have broken a trust and the public feels lied to.

By the way, journalism is not about the journalist, journalism is about the process, the story and the public they serve. Unfortunately, too many in the media believe that they are the focal point of every story, the center of the journalistic universe. You are not. The story will happen and will be told whether you are involved with it or not.

The pitfall for those who believe that, “It’s all about me” is that at some point in time you start to believe your own propaganda. You start to believe what your adoring audience tells you about you. You start to believe that you are right, that you know best, that you are the expert, and in fact, that you yourself are the source and the insight to just about everything.

Brian Williams with NBC Nightly News is a prime example of believing your own propaganda. Williams fabricated stories, sourced himself as well as out and out lied to the public on air and to his employer behind the scenes. Even when caught in his on-going fabrications and fired by NBC, Williams stayed in his make believe, self-absorbed world by telling his employer, “Maybe I had a brain tumor.”

News organizations are not about news but about money. There is a very old saying in television news of, “If it bleeds, it leads”. What is reported, and how it is reported will determine viewership, which in turns generates revenue. 

A good example of this of recent has been the perpetual news casts of President Trump’s collusion with the Russians. Although it has been proven time and time again that this story is false, networks like MSNBC keep running the story. Networks have given it top priority, even over actual breaking news. Why? The Trump/Russian collusion story is a rating success. It doesn’t matter to some “journalist” and “news” outlets that it is false. The story attracts eyeballs, which translates into dollars. It also advances a particular political agenda that some organizations desire. In this case, journalism has become the prostitute for the pimping news organizations.

Unfortunately, this is the environment we are in today.

To all journalist, Please! Be a true journalist and not a commentator, editorialist or worse, a propagandist! Please don’t determine an outcome then proceed to find things to support that end. Let the story tell the story.

Journalism is to, “provide people with verified information” and is a, “systematic process – a discipline of verification – that journalists use to find not just the facts, but also the “truth about the facts.” Source: The American Press Institute.

It isn’t about you, the journalist. It is about adhering to the journalistic process, staying with the truth and always verifying the facts. It is about responsibility to the profession, the story and above all, it is about responsibility to the general public.

News journalism is not about the art of persuasion, altering public opinion, pushing an agenda or achieving a desired outcome. News journalism is about informing the public about the truth of a matter. It is as simple as that.

Bill Hitchcock