This is Samuel Watkins, providing you with my first - yet one of many hot takes you will see from me in the coming days.
One of the first topics we covered in our Journalism 1 class was The Elements and Yardsticks of Journalism - two metrics used for identifying what’s important in news coverage. These 17 different standards (though some of the elements do overlap with some of the yardsticks) cover a vast array of topics in journalism, from initially obvious aspects like “truth”, to concepts that were a little more complex, such as the theme of “room for dissent.”
I found this to be really interesting because there’s now, there’s so much fighting between different partisan news networks… but even so, this standard still really isn’t met. If I’m trying to discover if something I see that’s shared is true, I usually just compare and cross-check with other articles I’ve seen. At the most, I’ll take a quick glance at something off of a site like Snopes.com to debunk headlines that appear too dramatic to be true. While it’s a supposed standard for journalists to both give room to criticize and criticize others - in this world of extreme partisanship, of facts and alternative facts, it still feels taboo to truly call someone or something wrong. In an effort to avoid bias, we’re often too afraid to admit when the other, or even our side has fouled. If that’s case… is there really any room for dissent at all?
One of the first topics we covered in our Journalism 1 class was The Elements and Yardsticks of Journalism - two metrics used for identifying what’s important in news coverage. These 17 different standards (though some of the elements do overlap with some of the yardsticks) cover a vast array of topics in journalism, from initially obvious aspects like “truth”, to concepts that were a little more complex, such as the theme of “room for dissent.”
I found this to be really interesting because there’s now, there’s so much fighting between different partisan news networks… but even so, this standard still really isn’t met. If I’m trying to discover if something I see that’s shared is true, I usually just compare and cross-check with other articles I’ve seen. At the most, I’ll take a quick glance at something off of a site like Snopes.com to debunk headlines that appear too dramatic to be true. While it’s a supposed standard for journalists to both give room to criticize and criticize others - in this world of extreme partisanship, of facts and alternative facts, it still feels taboo to truly call someone or something wrong. In an effort to avoid bias, we’re often too afraid to admit when the other, or even our side has fouled. If that’s case… is there really any room for dissent at all?
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