A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a former journalist about the philosophy of journalism. This man, Eric, thinks that journalism is doomed to fail.
People don’t care about the news unless it directly affects them, he said. As the people who can afford to purchase newspapers or online subscriptions to news websites are more or less unaffected by the daily events of the world, journalism as a means to make a living by informing the people has become less important.
This is ironic because with globalization, it has become more and more evident how our world is co-dependent. Even if a war in another country does not directly harm American citizens, it can affect our gas prices or our likelihood of experiencing another terrorist attack. Even if we do not suffer from a disease spreading across Africa, global health will be decreasing, our immune systems will be more at risk, our food may become more expensive or may become less healthy.
One of the goals of journalism, if it is to succeed philosophically in serving the public with news, is to convey how everything is actually affected by everything else. We must be collaborative and creative in figuring out how to do that, but with video and audio news so much more easily accessible than in previous decades, we have the means at our fingertips.
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