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Essay on Two Forms of Journalism

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Two Forms of Journalism Recent events such as the tsunami disaster (where blogs helped in covering the enormous size of the story), the war in Iraq (where blogs help to present both opinions of all parties involved), the Dan Rather's scandal, a CBS Evening News anchor who reported as authentic a series of forged documents about George W. Bush (where blogs were highly instrumental in exposing him) have all contributed to the growing popularity of citizen journalism. So, why is there a recent growth in popularity of citizen journalism? Is it because of the scandals that has eroded the credibility of traditional journalism or is out of touch with today's media landscape? And does any of it eventually mean the decline of traditional …show more content…

Another incidence includes the fabrication and plagiarisms in numerous articles by Jayson Blair, a Times reporter, who was exposed in 2003 after his article: "After effects: The Missing; Family Waits, Now Alone, for a Missing Soldier", in which he incorporated passages from an article that was published earlier in The San Antonio Express.

Traditional journalism has also prided itself as being an objective source of media, but pure objectivity is just a mirage. The limitation of human nature causes us to be biased, as we all have opinions which we directly or indirectly express in our communication, Added to this the financial, time and area space causes journalism to be subjective to a certain degree. But, another question arises, is subjectivity, an expression of one's opinions, necessarily bad? After all opinions give meaning to facts. One may argue that the presentation of opinions in the media would preclude people from making their own judgments, but aren't peoply independent beings with a mind of their own?

However, from the standpoint of traditional journalism where the audience has a trusted relationship with the media source or media person it might not be such good idea to be subjective mostly because of the certain sense of loyalty of the audience member towards his/her particular news

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