Mainstream journalism’s emphasis on professionalism, over the decades, has played a major role in defining what issues to cover and how to cover them. Its reportorial style promotes a certain bias that always favours the interests and concerns of the powerful and those in authority. As a result, professional journalism systematically discriminates against the powerless and the disenfranchised; everyday people, the same people journalists claim to represent.
Critics of professional journalism have argued that this bias is partly rooted in mainstream journalism’s economic logic that views audiences and readers as commodities for sale to the highest bidders. By its very nature and through its reportorial styles and the conduct of its members, professional journalism treats with levity the issues that are important to underrepresented groups in society. It shuts its doors to ‘everyday people’, and spits and farts in their faces in apparent contempt. In other words, professional journalism alienates and insulates journalists from those they purport to represent.
Professional journalism, with its emphasis on detachment, objectivity, and attribution, is no longer adequate as a news model for effectively explaining the complex social changes occurring in society. What journalism needs, therefore, is a reportorial technique that will make reporters less aloof from and more accessible to poor, rural people, abused women and children, and people living with HIV/AIDS.
There is no doubt that access to information has assumed a new imperative in the distribution of wealth and power, in solving complex social and economic problems, and in ensuring full and meaningful participation of citizens in politics. Paradoxically, it appears that as information has become more and more important for human survival, media institutions across national cultures have become increasingly less diverse and inaccessible to the ordinary majority of citizens. It appears that ordinary people are now less equipped to process and use information necessary for meaningful and effective participation in public governance and development.
It is now time to earnestly begin to re-conceptualise journalistic practice with a view to acknowledging that journalism is not only about ‘watch-dogging’ government and public officials, and neither is it all about ‘paparazing’ the rich and the (in)famous. Rather, and more importantly, one of the challenges of journalism in the 21st century society is confronting head on and with urgency such issues as poverty, HIV/AIDS, illiteracy, and the abuse of women and children.
The history of journalism is full of changing styles, shifting principles, and alternative structures of news organisations. Across much of the world, different social systems operate news media systems and journalistic orientations that are compatible with their national cultures and political systems. This is partly why the nature of media ownership and the degree of political control of news differ from country to country and generation to generation. It is also why reporters from different cultures have different perspectives about the role of journalism in society, especially how journalists should relate to government and the governed, to public and private institutions, and to the powerful and the powerless in society. Consequently, how news work is done across national cultures and generations produces different consequences.
Poverty and HIV/AIDS and related issues are making demands on individuals and communities, and on institutions and organisations. Our society is under tremendous pressure to provide sustainable solutions to these problems. For journalism to have significant beneficial consequences for those living with HIV/AIDS and poverty, it should be less rooted in the economic principle of profit- making and competition: it should be deeply entrenched in seeking and solving societal problems. Development workers who work with the poor and those living with HIV/AIDS are well aware that by narrowing the distance between them and those they report about, reporters may help save more lives than doctors and nurses.
The appeal of the economic logic of professional journalism, however, is so compelling that it ably hides its inadequacies. This presents a dilemma for journalism: how to balance economic imperatives of profit making and survivability and the cultural and democratic necessities of participation and development.
While it may not be easy to jettison the market model of news work, there are other ways its limitations can be overcome. What is needed right now is a news reporting style that is grounded in the experience and context of people who live in poverty and those who live with HIV/AIDS; a news reporting model that is not intimidating and alienating to the powerless, but one that encourages meaningful conversations between reporters and individuals and communities. HIV/AIDS and poverty need reporters who can be perceived as neighbours and as helpers and not as adversaries, or as nosy-parkers who hang around and sniff around for dirt. The type of reporting style being proposed here is not new. It has been around for decades. It is what most alternative news media do for their audiences, i.e., encouraging communities to look for solutions to individual and community problems in a collaborative and collective manner.
The market model of news work, however, sees poverty and HIV/AIDS primarily as individual rather than collective problems. To mainstream journalism, poor people and those living with HIV/AIDS have no economic value. They are an irritation, an embarrassment.
Journalism of the 21st century society should not be afraid to cover poverty or HIV/AIDS. It should be capable of not only providing real images and factual analyses of poverty and HIV/AIDS but also making them available and accessible to ordinary people.
The news media and journalists at various times and in different contexts have been able to set individual and group agendas, mobilise individuals and communities, and act as ‘bards and troubadours’. They should do the same by embedding with the powerless, i.e., those living with HIV/AIDS, rural people, poor people, abused women and children, and the illiterate.
Mainstream journalism’s emphasis on professionalism, over the decades, has played a major role in defining what issues to cover and how to cover them. Its reportorial style promotes a certain bias that always favours the interests and concerns of the powerful and those in authority. As a result, professional journalism systematically discriminates against the powerless and the disenfranchised; everyday people, the same people journalists claim to represent.
Critics of professional journalism have argued that this bias is partly rooted in mainstream journalism’s economic logic that views audiences and readers as commodities for sale to the highest bidders. By its very nature and through its reportorial styles and the conduct of its members, professional journalism treats with levity the issues that are important to underrepresented groups in society. It shuts its doors to ‘everyday people’, and spits and farts in their faces in apparent contempt. In other words, professional journalism alienates and insulates journalists from those they purport to represent.
Professional journalism, with its emphasis on detachment, objectivity, and attribution, is no longer adequate as a news model for effectively explaining the complex social changes occurring in society. What journalism needs, therefore, is a reportorial technique that will make reporters less aloof from and more accessible to poor, rural people, abused women and children, and people living with HIV/AIDS.
There is no doubt that access to information has assumed a new imperative in the distribution of wealth and power, in solving complex social and economic problems, and in ensuring full and meaningful participation of citizens in politics. Paradoxically, it appears that as information has become more and more important for human survival, media institutions across national cultures have become increasingly less diverse and inaccessible to the ordinary majority of citizens. It appears that ordinary people are now less equipped to process and use information necessary for meaningful and effective participation in public governance and development.
It is now time to earnestly begin to re-conceptualise journalistic practice with a view to acknowledging that journalism is not only about ‘watch-dogging’ government and public officials, and neither is it all about ‘paparazing’ the rich and the (in)famous. Rather, and more importantly, one of the challenges of journalism in the 21st century society is confronting head on and with urgency such issues as poverty, HIV/AIDS, illiteracy, and the abuse of women and children.
The history of journalism is full of changing styles, shifting principles, and alternative structures of news organisations. Across much of the world, different social systems operate news media systems and journalistic orientations that are compatible with their national cultures and political systems. This is partly why the nature of media ownership and the degree of political control of news differ from country to country and generation to generation. It is also why reporters from different cultures have different perspectives about the role of journalism in society, especially how journalists should relate to government and the governed, to public and private institutions, and to the powerful and the powerless in society. Consequently, how news work is done across national cultures and generations produces different consequences.
Poverty and HIV/AIDS and related issues are making demands on individuals and communities, and on institutions and organisations. Our society is under tremendous pressure to provide sustainable solutions to these problems. For journalism to have significant beneficial consequences for those living with HIV/AIDS and poverty, it should be less rooted in the economic principle of profit- making and competition: it should be deeply entrenched in seeking and solving societal problems. Development workers who work with the poor and those living with HIV/AIDS are well aware that by narrowing the distance between them and those they report about, reporters may help save more lives than doctors and nurses.
The appeal of the economic logic of professional journalism, however, is so compelling that it ably hides its inadequacies. This presents a dilemma for journalism: how to balance economic imperatives of profit making and survivability and the cultural and democratic necessities of participation and development.
While it may not be easy to jettison the market model of news work, there are other ways its limitations can be overcome. What is needed right now is a news reporting style that is grounded in the experience and context of people who live in poverty and those who live with HIV/AIDS; a news reporting model that is not intimidating and alienating to the powerless, but one that encourages meaningful conversations between reporters and individuals and communities. HIV/AIDS and poverty need reporters who can be perceived as neighbours and as helpers and not as adversaries, or as nosy-parkers who hang around and sniff around for dirt. The type of reporting style being proposed here is not new. It has been around for decades. It is what most alternative news media do for their audiences, i.e., encouraging communities to look for solutions to individual and community problems in a collaborative and collective manner.
The market model of news work, however, sees poverty and HIV/AIDS primarily as individual rather than collective problems. To mainstream journalism, poor people and those living with HIV/AIDS have no economic value. They are an irritation, an embarrassment.
Journalism of the 21st century society should not be afraid to cover poverty or HIV/AIDS. It should be capable of not only providing real images and factual analyses of poverty and HIV/AIDS but also making them available and accessible to ordinary people.
The news media and journalists at various times and in different contexts have been able to set individual and group agendas, mobilise individuals and communities, and act as ‘bards and troubadours’. They should do the same by embedding with the powerless, i.e., those living with HIV/AIDS, rural people, poor people, abused women and children, and the illiterate.