User:Amgine/Essays/On the purpose and practice of journalism

The purpose of professional journalism is to sell advertising.

The best any journalist may hope for is to report what is known; there is no such thing as truth in journalism.

The entire concept of the fourth estate requires an informed citizenry be an outside force to government, and that the media be able and interested in selectively informing the people.

Practice of journalism
The economics of journalism does not, except in unusual cases, support its practice as an art. In most venues its purpose is to garner an audience which has some value as an advertising market, or to practice marketing within its reporting. The latter has been the primary use of journalism in the western cultures over the history of journalism, although in most cases both purposes are used in practice.

Attempts by journalists and their publishing organizations to claim neutrality are easily refutable. Neutrality is often - not always - a laudable goal, but it must always be unattainable when presenting facts in their context, or when attempting to describe the implications of events. Over-riding the professional practice of journalism is the necessary financial motivation - publication of news reporting must generate revenues at least great enough to cover the costs of publication of news reporting.

In many commercial news publications the business infrastructure dedicated to generating those revenues involves more resources of a higher quality than those dedicated to generating the news content. This is the logical necessity of the economics: the business model is to sell advertising, not to report news.

The truth fallacy
Truth is defined, on Wiktionary, as "The state or quality of being true to someone or something." Being 'right' relative to some person or group is not a useful, objective measure for journalists.

There are questions a journalist cannot answer for all audiences everywhere. When a fact or event is disputed, all that may be reported is what may be verified. In Ireland the British monarchy was able to win the battles and ultimately control the country, and even now continues to claim the crown of the country as part of the United Kingdom, but if they won the military war they just as obviously lost the war for the hearts and minds of the Irish people and eventually gave most of the country its independence. It would be inaccurate to say they conquered the country.

An accurate representation of the facts is not truth. Water rarely boils at 100C/212F; it does so only at a pressure arbitrarily called 'sea level' with absolutely pure H2O. A journalist need not give such a nuanced description of the facts, but should be aware of them.

This chapter, extracted from Hemingway's In Our Time, is an accurate portrayal of the facts of the execution of the Greek Ministers during the country's civil war. It is entirely drawn from secondary sources, much the way most Wikinews articles are written:


 * They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

It fails to report that one of the ministers was already dead, probably of heart failure. After the execution the soldiers rushed forward and shot the bodies repeatedly, including the previously-deceased. There are many other specific facts which were likely known to Hemmingway, yet not reported in this photo-realistic summary of the news event. Despite its accuracy, this report is not the truth.

There is no moral justification
Reporting news is a human behaviour. In most cases we call it gossip. We inform each other about our world, our beliefs, our understanding of what is known, and then we fall to speculating about what it all means if only to us in our small worlds.

The professional practice of journalism focuses on the most spectacular, most titillating, most remarkable elements of news. In no way does it specifically attempt to inform and influence the general populace regarding the government or governance except as it helps the professional practice of journalism meet its primary purpose: to sell advertising.