With
technological advancement spreading in the world at an enourmous speed and
rate, new media has become the heart of the profession of journalism. Though
traditional media is still explored, journalists feel a need to move with the
times hence the use of new media technologies that is the information
communication technologies. However like any other element introduced into this
world, new media, though with its positive impact, have presented a challenge
to the basic journalistic values that have crippled the profession of
journalism causing journalists not to be a trusted source of information.
Therefore, this article provides an attempt to address these challenges by
exploring the basic journalistic values that have been compromised such as
accuracy, relevancy, reliability originality, neutrality, objectivity and
balance.
Reliability
has been many compromised by the use of pseudo names especially in social
networking sites such as face book and twitter. For starters it is within human
nature that one finds difficulty in trusting someone or something they cannot
name. As a result it becomes difficult for individuals to rely on pseudonyms
people as their source of information. To further drive the point home some of
the sources using pseudo names have in the past disappointed the people by not
disseminating truthful or reliable information. Baba Jukwa, for instance has
published some political stories that have not been truthful such as the death
of the president.
Speaking
on social media practitioners, Green (2010) states that they tend to
disseminate information that is not neutral but a reflection of their affiliations
in the loci of that topic. This is to say that new media has paved for
neutrality to be compromised as bloggers, facebookers, twitter users run a
chance of being biased towards one side over the other. As a result this
inshrines the basic neutrality demands of the profesion of journalism thereby
causing people to lose hope and trust in journalism.
New
media has also suppressed the basic journalistic standard of accuracy by giving
birth to citizen journalism. This is whereby any citizen assumes the role of a
journalist by giving information to the masses through the online media.But the
pitfall becomes that not all citizens are responsible and will act accordingly
to the demands of journalism ethics. As a result, citizens disseminate
information whose facts are shady and inaccurate.This as a result lowers the
vibrant nature of the profession of journalism. This can be noted from the
Harare based boy who was arrested for disseminating inaccurate information on
facebook that the president was dead
According
to Reuchlin (2012), journalists have an obligation of showing significance and
relevancy of news to the general public. As such any information disseminated
to the masses should be of public interest not interesting to the public.
However with the emergence of new media so has irrelevant and insignificant
information. A debatable issue to show this argument is of the MDC-T leaderMorgan Tsangirai’s sex escapades. Though others argue that he is a public
figure and has to be exposed it was however not in the interests of the people
or the well-being of the people to publish his dirty laundry considering that
there were more pressing issue to be discussed.
Unlike
traditional media, new media requires constant publish and updating of
stories.This means that journalists also have to fast track the way they do
things to meet the demands of new media and to stay abreast. However this has
kind of led to journalist posting unfinished stories that present one side of
the story.The lack of multi sourcing to be on track has inturn compromised the value of balance leading to the
downgrading of journalsm. Price et al (2011) notes that most of the online
media especially social networks are an
‘instant thing’ where journalists just get a story and publish it with
excitement sometimes without even getting the other half of the story. He
further explains that new media has perpetuated half baked stories.
To
tie the knot, it is with the illustrations and explanations given above that
buttress the point that new media has become a strengthening enzyme in down pulling the profession of journalism. It
is the lost ethics such as lack of sourcing and verification and impartiality,
in the reportage of matters in the new media that has led to people losing
their trust in journalists and or the profession as a whole.
