Hi, Everyone Yale is here. This week I am going to talk about Truth and objectivity and more information about post modern causalities or victims of PR piracy. Actually, I do not have deep knowledge and that is why this week’s topic was quite interesting to research.

 

Let’s talk about Postmodern causalities first. Postmodernism came like an wild horse escaping the confines of the modernist barn. It arrived when the world realized technology may not save the world after all, in fact men like Hitler and inventions like the atom bomb proved technology could end civilization as we know it.

However, Truth is a tricky concept. Journalism is all about decision making. If we were to give three people the same story – no matter how straight the story we would most likely end up with three different angles. So where do truth and objectivity lie? Or do they exist at all? I believe that of course we can strive towards truth and objectivity but perhaps achieving fairness is more realistic than achieving totally objectivity. To achieve fairness and strive towards objectivity in our reporting we need to get the whole story. To do this we need to talk to as many people as many people as we can and keeping asking and re-asking questions. We need to take our ‘blinkers’ off and get as many viewpoints as we can. In order to maximise profits, media organisations demand increased output from journalists across multiple news media platforms and at the same time cut costs by reducing journalist staff numbers. Due to the increased workload and pressure to meet deadlines, journalists no longer have time to hit the ground to gather news, or even to spend precious time making inquiries as part of the fact-checking process. Journalists have instead come to rely on public relations agencies and news wire services for both news gathering and fact checking.
Lastly, There is concern that these days Journalists don’t spend the time needed to look at what’s behind a PR release. While a good media release can be a great foundation for a story – we need to verify the facts. Now, more than ever, there is information going straight into news from PR releases without verification of the facts. In fact a study by Mcnamara found that 31% of news stories in a variety of outlets were based wholly or partly on media releases. We must remember that PR companies have the invested interest of getting their stuff on the news and in the papers. As journalists it’s important we don’t blindly trust what they write. We can never cross-check too many facts.
This is end of this week’s blog 🙂 Hope everyone enjoy my blog post !!! Have a great day