Journalism is both a profession and a discipline that deals with careful gathering, distilling and processing of facts, and reporting or publishing pieces of information relevant to the public.
The News Manual defines journalists principally "as men and women who present information as news to the audiences of newspapers, magazines, radio or television stations or the Internet."
The public has learned the significance of the news media as the principal provider of information, however it is equally important to know how do we classify "information" in the context of real journalism.
Infotainment Journalism
One of the criticisms that the corporate media is facing today is its delivery of commentaries, reviews, gossips, entertainment news and other elements that aim at exercising infotainment journalism, in a supposed formal newscast. Many say that these are unnecessary, even at the basis of news gathering alone.
A blog post entitled TV News: Infotainment, Not Journalism writes that as news providers fade from their historical role in covering world events, "we're left with an unhealthy dependency on the news-gathering and news judgment of television networks." (yelvington.com, published January 2008, accessed October 2010)
On the one hand, The American Journalism Review publishes a book review of Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death, by Susan D. Moeller. The review writes about what appears to be a conundrum of journalism, "if you fail to cover a story, you do wrong; but if you cover it, you can go wrong, too."
The said review entitled "When Suffering Becomes Infotainment," quotes the book author, Susan D. Moeller on formulaic and sensationalized reporting during crisis and vulnerable times, "Suffering becomes infotainment --just another commodity, another moment of pain to get its minute or column in the news." (published November 1998, accessed October 2010)
Information Versus Data
The public has its due right to information in a "supposed-democratic" state. People need to take hold of such information in order to properly exercise their citizen-critic duties. By and large, journalists take the principal role of providing these essential pieces of information.
There is a huge borderline that differentiates information from data, however both of these are "types of knowledge or something used to attain knowledge."
Data refers to a set of raw and unprocessed facts. It is a group, which reveals quantitative and qualitative attributes of a certain subject. In contrary, information is the processed result of data. Thus, a set of data is a prerequisite to information.
An article entitled "Difference Between Data and Information," summarizes that information is a higher level of knowledge compared to data. It also adds, "data by itself alone is not significant and information is significant by itself." (differencebetween.net, accessed October 2010)
Since journalists have the ability to select and provide information, which are indeed significant to the public, they are to provide information, not just chunks of statistics.
Journalist as Public Explainer
The news media serves as the “public explainer” of different political and social issues. As a direct consequence, the media has tremendous effects in mobilizing and reinforcing public knowledge and support for an effective political action.
Tom Rosenstiel from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism outlines four potential roles for journalists in a multimedia world:
- Authenticator: Help the audience figure out what to believe, what can they trust
- Sense-maker: Help the audience derive meaning from what is happening in the world
- Navigator: Help the audience find their way around a story
- Forum-leader: Help the audience engage in a discussion in a knowledgeable way
As public explainers, it is the role of journalists to transform complicated socio-cultural, socio-political and socio-economic issues into comprehensible and understandable pieces of information before the public. Philippine alternative news agency Bulatlat writes, "The media’s role has always been to inform the public about these issues and to provide a vehicle where these are discussed."
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Yfur Porsche Fernandez - Yfur writes diverse articles on political economy, media literacy, East Asian affairs, poverty & world development, trivial literature, ...
