Why Be a Journalist?

If the media and journalists in general suffer from such low credibility, why bother to be a journalist these days? If profit and ratings are a primary occupation of network owners and newspaper publishers alike, why venture into what is supposed to be a noble profession, or rather, a calling? If media independence can be compromised for corporate and personal interests alone, why slug it out to find a spot in journalism? If journalism in this country equates to a vow of poverty and if journalists are being killed like pigs in a slaughterhouse, why bother to write for a public that doesn’t seem to care about journalists anyway? These are some of the questions that arise whenever issues and problems that plague journalism are discussed in various fora or in classrooms. Sadly, many young aspiring and idealistic journalists begin to have second thoughts about wearing press cards on their chests because of the same problems that have stuck to the media like chewing gum on a newly cemented sidewalk. To journalism teachers and educators, this can be disheartening. They spend months, semesters, and even years, preparing students who, they hope, will be sources of change and promise in the near future, only to be told that nope, these students would rather land a job in the corporate world, public relations, advertising, or even law. The temptation to sugarcoat realities in the media can be strong sometimes, just to keep the attraction strong. But glamor, fun, power, popularity, and influence would be the most wrong of reasons to be in the world of journalism. These have been the very reasons for journalism’s own decline: the twisted values of some, if not many, of its practitioners or pseudo-practitioners. In his “Letters to a Young Journalist,” Samuel Freedman, a columnist of the New York Times and a professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, writes: “I am not afraid to speak of journalism as a moral calling—as a vocation, in the priestly sense of the word—because I am not afraid to hold myself to a moral standard… There is an old saying that anyone who’s not a socialist at twenty has no heart and anyone who’s not a capitalist at forty has no brain. Along the same lines, anyone who doesn’t enter journalism believing it is a moral enterprise might as well move straight on to speculating in foreign currency or manufacturing Agent Orange. There will be disappointments enough over the course of your career; your initial idealism must be a pilot light, flickering at times, but never extinguished.” He writes further, “Being moral is not the same as being moralistic. I do not urge you to carp and sniff at human frailty from the sideline. I do urge you to bear witness. I urge you to celebrate moments of human achievement and unearth evidence of human venality. I urge you to tell the story. I urge you to be accountable, to your public and to yourself, for what you do and how you do it.” In the end, journalism is about telling stories that matter to people. As effective storytellers and reporters, journalists commit themselves to a life-long process of learning and pledge humility, ever aware that they may not get each and every story a hundred percent right all the time. The painful and ugly realities in journalism are all part of the human frailties and venalities that Freedman writes about. If no one told other people about them, they would forever be cast in stone, immortalized and unchanged. Being witness and bearing witness are privileges extended to journalists. “To be witness, observer, and storyteller, and to develop and refine the skills of each, is to accept the burden of independent thought… It is to welcome the dissonance of human events and render that dissonance with coherence and style. All of these exercises stretch the brain and all of them elevate the spirit,” says Freedman. What can be more edifying than that?