Good Journalism-J1

Good Journalism

A couple weeks ago my Journalism class talked about what was good and bad “Journalism”. When teaching us,our teacher Mr.Miller used two sets of guidelines. First, being the 10 elements of Journalism, and secondly being the 7 yardsticks. Some of the most useful in my mind being “truth”, “being a watchdog”, and lastly “Verification”. These three really hit my brain instantly and have stuck with me.

First, we’ll go over the 3 I gave earlier.First, telling the truth. The first thing that comes to mind when talking about journalism is telling the truth. We always see “Journalist” getting critiqued and losing lots of credibility because they don't tell the truth. Prime example, let’s look at Alex Jones. He has come up with some of the craziest lies ever. He really thinks the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax and set up by Hillary Clinton for a secret motive to get gun control legislation passed. Since then he’s lost all credibility, and in the foreseeable future will never gain any. He is an example of bad journalism. Telling the truth is important because people are reading and listening to what you say, therefore they will most likely believe you if you have credibility.

Next, we will talk about “being a watchdog”. Another problem in American journalism is, we often overlook people in power and don’t hold them accountable. This is happening a lot more during the Trump administration then I would say wou happening during the Obama administration. But, we definitely don't look over corporations and or political organizations as much as political leaders. I haven't yet grasped why ,or maybe its because the corporations are paying the news organizations money to not talk about them. We should be reporting about these things,but sadly it's not.

The last element I will be talking about is verification. When writing a story often times journalist will put sources(multiple),but recently I’ve seen many false and untrue sources. When doing the verification step, you should check your source and not just read the headline and copy/paste.

If you can master these three steps you will be a great Journalist. Only those with the mindset of mastering something, you will always succeed!