Journalist keep an independence from those they cover by maintaining accuracy, verification, and serving the public interest and the desire to inform the people.
Parts of the trade in journalism includes, adhering to the principles of truthfulness, which is the key to journalism if you truly want success. Another may be an allegiance to the citizens and community that as a journalist you will give them the news they need to know for their community.
What makes good journalism is bringing the truth to the citizens, so they can make self governing decisions. In many cases of reporting may involve playing a watchdog role and providing a forum for public debate, but it can often tend to become more of an opinion based. It's not wrong to have opinions in reporting, but must keep in to consideration not to be bias towards the other party, and to back up all opinions with facts that support the statement you are considering. The objective for journalism should be less of your opinions and more of the people’s opinion.
Our goal as a journalist is to report accurate reliable news for the people and not to always state our opinions towards the subject. I have notice some journalist may have a story in mind, so when they ask their sources questions, they will ask in a way that can verify the story they would like to report. For my personal opinion I don't like this approach towards writing a story, I don't think it is the best ethical way of reporting. It seems like it is more towards the journalist interest and not for the people.
A good journalist should remain neutral not favoring anyone stance or opinion but reporting the facts as they are, and therefore he or she should not write from their own perspective but report truth from an unbiased standard.
I really like what was said in the group presentation on independence from class, economic, status, race, and ethnicity, that as a white Caucasian male, I should not be bound to only report news on white males, that we can write about anyone, and anything; that is how it should be, we are writing to vast audiences of all statuses and races and not to just one specific group. As journalist, we should be well rounded in many areas and if not, then we should always research our story, which I will say, any great story should always be researched and time spent collecting data and information before writing or reporting a lot of information that may not be as in-depth or important as it can be.
From the reading, reporter William Safire reports cold hard facts, and believes having a political background has helped him in his reporting. He was a speech writer for President Nixon, and that is basically what He did was state facts with evidence. I believe it is vital to say, whatever you put in your story to always back it up with facts and data in all that is reported. It will bring more credibility to the reporter.
Advocacy of opinion journalism:
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