Do you think objectivity can be achieved in journalism or is journalism always going to be influenced by opinions?

Do you think objectivity can be achieved in journalism or is journalism always going to be influenced by opinions?

Objectivity in journalism is when the writer of an article does not show his opinion about an event. Can objectivity be reached in journalism or is it always going to be influenced by opinions ? Journalists normally mustn’t let us see their point of view but today, a lot of newspapers are not impartial. I think that the great majority of press articles are not neutral although it is not evident.

To start with, we must remind that the very first role of a journalist is to inform people about the news. He must do it in an honest and unbiased way. To do so, the journalist must “forget” his political ideas because they impact the perception of an event and he has to do his best to hide them when writing an article. To create a neutral press article, journalists have to mention their sources so we can check them and do further researches ourselves. Of course, journalists are required not to lie and to base their information only on verifiable facts.

Yet, unfortunately, everyone has their own convictions and we cannot dismiss them so easily. Even if journalists want to do so, their subconscious will always show what they think. Every choice of word is important and can totally change to way we perceive an event. For instance, the description of the Capitol incident on January, 6th 2021 as a “breach” is completely different from an “assault”. Both are about the Capitol event but the second word is more violent. Moreover, on television or in videos on Internet, the camera angle can alter our view of a scene and thus make us think that we get an objective point of view when we actually don’t. On top of that, knowing that the purpose of the whole media system is to make money, journalists tend to try to create articles that will attract the attention of the readers even if means turning their words in a way that suggests a specific opinion.

To sum up, we can say that in theory journalists are objective but in reality, the majority of what we see in the press is politically oriented on one side. We can keep ourselves informed as long as we make our own researches using several sources of information.

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