Impact of technology on Basic journalistic values

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.