Should I be a Journalist? [08.27.03]

Here I am embarking on what will be my first real "journalism" work, and I already find myself wondering, do I really want to do this? What I mean is, am I sure I actually want to be a journalist, given what today's mainstream mass media has become?

I have only been a journalism major for about eight months now, but over that time I have come to the conclusion that mainstream media has become a negative force in America, manipulating our fears and failing in its primary role in a free-speech society.

Our nation's founding fathers recognized that a free press is critical in a democracy, which is why the First Amendment to the Constitution expressly forbids congress from making any laws restricting freedom of the press. Because of this freedom, the press plays an important role as a watchdog on the government. In fact, the press is often called the "fourth estate," acting as another branch of government in the system of checks and balances.

However, it seems to me that mainstream media has lost sight of this. The way George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, and company have been running things, this is a time when America desperately needs the media to keep the government honest. Instead, media has almost become an agent of the Bush Administration. Leading up to and during the war in Iraq, the media practically became a public relations firm for the White House, gobbling up every press release Ari Fleischer gave them. Newspapers and 24-hour news stations were infatuated with the term "shock-and-awe." News of anti-war rallies was downplayed by nearly every major media outlet. The San Francisco Chronicle even went so far as to claim that the number of people at a February anti-war march in San Francisco was over-estimated by a factor of four.

The Jessica Lynch story may have been worst example. It broke in the news as an inspiring, heroic rescue story that would boost the morale of the entire country. The story included everything from Lynch's never-say-die firefight with Iraqi troops to an Iraqi civilian's thirty mile round trip walk from the hospital to tell American troops where they could find her.

As it turned out, much of the story was fabricated. Lynch was not shot or stabbed, as had been reported, but injured in a car accident. Her own family denied reports that she had amnesia. Despite these and other revelations, mass media still gave Lynch a hero's welcome when she returned home.

The other major problem with the media is the way it tries to grab your attention with sensational headlines and overblown statistics. The movie "Bowling for Columbine" was inspired in part by a book called "The Culture of Fear" by Barry Glassner. The book analyzes how America as a society has been conditioned, partially by the media, to be paranoid about relatively inconsequential things. Glassner gives the example of the poisoned Halloween candy scare that began in the early 1970s. This scare, which lasted more than a decade, was based entirely on fear, not fact. There are only two documented cases of children dying from poisoned candy, and both involved the children's own families, not, as Glassner calls them, "sadistic strangers."

There are many other examples, from flesh-eating bacteria to a link between abortion and breast cancer. And even when these fears are discredited in the news, the stories are buried in the back pages of the newspaper, whereas the stories initially broke in giant headlines on the front page.

Now I realize that not all media outlets are guilty of these faults. It"s just that being a member of the press is no longer as noble as it once was. The media has lost sight of its purpose in America. Perhaps I can be a force for change, but I think it's a long uphill battle.