Over 60% of people view journalism as more dangerous than ten years ago
safety.com
safety.com
But regarding whether journalism is more dangerous now than it was 10 years ago (around the time I left journalism) ...
There are some journalists who cover breaking news and put themselves in harm's way, and for them, the danger to their health and safety will always be a part of the job.
But for the vast majority of journalists, the biggest danger of their job is the business environment, which has been on a downward trajectory for decades, and the distrust of the media, which has picked up over the past five years.
In other words, if you look at journalists as a whole, the vast majority of whom are toiling away for low salaries at media outlets that are struggling to turn a profit, the biggest threat is not that they're going to get physically hurt but that they won't be able to make ends meet, or won't have a job next month.
I have spent nearly 20 years keeping tabs on proposed new business models that might be able to allow journalism to flourish again -- worker cooperatives, benefactor-supported models, independent bloggers, etc. -- but unfortunately so much of the existing journalism infrastructure is tied up in mega-corps, and it's going to take a LOT of work to act against that momentum.
Most (but admittedly not all) reporters and editors I've known have held themselves to the code you mention. The problem is that it's very rare for a reporter or editor to have the final say. It's the publisher who has that prerogative. And most (but not all) publishers I've met have little sense of that code. Their job is to make money for their shareholders. And in a desperate environment where ever dollar is hard-won, it doesn't surprise me that the publishers have resorted to tactics that water down the credulity of their properties.
Our local newspapers have seen similar cutbacks. The left and right wing papers were bought out, merged and now the same staff produce 2 different papers with slightly different spins on the same matters.
With all these cutbacks, it's no wonder journalists have a harder time doing in depth and thorough jobs reporting the stories of the day. The advertising dollars have walked away from the local news outlets, and as a result there is far less local oversight.
If we as a society don't figure out how to address how journalism is funded, things will continue to the point where only some well funded niches remain covered in any depth. Democracy can't function without oversight, and citizens can't exercise their oversight of governments without knowledge of what is going on. This is dangerous for the public, but it's not the journalists' fault. And bad journalism happens when journalists aren't funded to do the kind of in depth stories that cost real dollars to investigate and produce.
At the end of the day, not a single journalist has been held personally responsible for the lies and division they're responsible for endlessly peddling in the Western world over the past 10 years.
The only journalists who've come to harm are those who've exposed the truth, which really should give everyone something to think about.
In the U.S., "an unprecedented 110 [journalists] were arrested or charged in 2020, many while covering demonstrations against police violence; at least 12 still face charges."
https://cpj.org/2020/12/number-of-journalists-jailed-worldwi...
In the first three incidents listed, they are "independent journalists."
(1) One of these independent journalists asked to be identified through their Twitter handle.
Their name on Twitter is "Andy Ngo is a fascist," and their bio is "ACAB means all of 'em, including Kamala." The first handful of their tweets includes "F* the peace police" in reference to those attempting to stop violence from occurring at a protest.
This person is most certainly not a part of the press, and it is not surprising this person would be arrested, presumably for violent behavior, at a protest.
(2) Looking at other cases, many of these "independent reporters" don't seem to exist anywhere on the internet under their legal name. The first and only relevant search result is the Press Freedom Tracker website.
(3) Another one is actually a hairdresser instead, and not a reporter. No articles ever written that I can find, and on Twitter, no reference to journalism - just being a cat mom and lots of swearing about politics.
It's really disappointing to lose faith in the Press Freedom Tracker. I expected a high level of journalistic integrity, and it feels so instinctually wrong to lose trust in an organization like that, but wow.
For example, the top three incidents involve verifiable journalists. You neglect to mention these before skipping to #4, the ACAB twitter account.
Yes, legitimate journalists are sometimes arrested by police, and this website documents those cases accurately.
Seeing that a substantial number of their incidents are misleading or false, however, takes away from the validity of their data.
I can trust them to report an individual incident accurately in their incidents involving legitimate journalists, but I cannot not trust their data. As every journalist knows — one false incident and the credibility of your data is lost.
Citation needed
The survey is about whether it has gotten more dangerous to be a journalist.
That is interesting though. Journalism is in major crisis.
The sinister fact about journalism censorship is that it is largely voluntary.... Things are kept right out of the mass media, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact.... At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical hatred of Russia and Trump. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it.
Any serious criticism of the Trump/Russia, any disclosure of facts which Trump/Russia would prefer to keep hidden, is front page. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. Common folks still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. It is the left wing who fear liberty and the elites who want to do dirt on the intellect.
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Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
Noam Chomsky
Not so many were prosecuted under these acts, but many did flee or change their tone.
This all to say that the influence of newspapers is not a novel issue, and the issue remains alive today, especially amidst the current wave of very Yellow Journalism.
Anyway. I thought it was interesting - I may have botched some of the details.
Now let's play this game with MSNBC, Reuters, AP, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, etc.
Assigning vector values to each of these sources, is it your contention that they too sum to zero?
Over the last several years, the average number of attacks has been somewhere between 30-50 per year, but in 2020 alone, this number has jumped to over 220 attacks with one month left remaining — setting a record.
These numbers are likely misrepresented, too, given that minor attacks and assaults remain unreported to authorities
How do they define a "physical attack"? Is that assault, stabbing, kidnapping? They don't say. The context of the types of attacks is missing some context.
In the 1980's & 90's there were so many hot spots in the world where it was insanely dangerous just to travel to if you were an American let alone a journalist reporting on it. I don't know that abroad its as dangerous as it used to be back then, or maybe with all the of problems here, the stuff in Somalia or Turkey isn't making the headlines anymore? I'm just not queued into a lot of the civil unrest in other areas of the world right now where its still very dangerous to report on as a freelance journalist.
I feel like a lot of the physical violence has been replaced by online and social media mob culture that has taken over. People you never heard of just getting stampeded online. Gamer Gate is a great example of a social media war that left a ton of people's lives (many journalists included) destroyed. Most of the people I had no idea who they were before Gamer Gate, but as I fell into the wormhole, you saw a lot of journalists getting mixed up and then destroyed when the mob came from them.
"Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on current events based on facts and supported with proof or evidence."
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I am convinced that journalists don't exist any longer. Journalists used to be people who were academically educated and trained in the field with knowledge and skill in working as reporters or columnist. Reports and even columns were written with the goal of presenting a problem in an unbiased tone to educate the reader.
Nowadays instead of illuminating problems and educating, media companies are exclusively interested in generating revenue in the highly competitive market, hiring freelancers and accepting royalty-free submissions from anonymous people. Instead of reports and columns, we have "blitz-posts" and other types of submissions which seem to be written for half-literate population, judging by their length and choice of words.
I would say journalism as we used to know it went downhill with the rise of WWW, where anybody can be anybody. As much as that can be a positive thing, in this case I believe had negative consequences and it was a matter of time before it backfired. Yes, I am blaming these "journalists" hence the warning that it might be an unpopular opinion. Competing in who will provoke, scandalise and scaremonger better and faster multiple times per day in order to generate more clicks, views and ad revenue, despite being completely disgusting and revolting, seems to have pushed some people over the edge and resulted in distrust of the media.
Covid is the latest and perfect example of how the media can shape the opinion of the masses, especially when the masses have questionable intellectual capacity, as a result of trying to outperform the competition. I dare say majority of people only read the headlines and move on to consume more information. I don't know what the solution is.
I think, rising with WWW, James Randi and his followers are more and more numerous and reach further than they did. People that 10 years ago i thought were in weird places.
I think this phenomenon has just become more obvious to more of the population.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
Gov funded = Authoritarianism
Privately funded = Capitalism and maximization of revenue
The latter has shown its ugly aspects - engagement is inversely proportional to delivering hard truths to the user.
Do you think of BBC as a mechanism of authoritarianism?
The intercept wrote an interesting article where they FOIA'd for communication between journalists and the CIA.
Tldr: the CIA has assets in major news outlets that will do their bidding and publish whatever propaganda suits their agenda.
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-...
It is only worth what someone will pay for it. Not sure who said that first but it makes sense to me in this case. It makes me think of iconic images of Americana that may never have happened outside celluloid; the work-a-day folks streaming past a television shop, stopping to stare at the glowing screens and watching the news broadcast. Doubt this would happen if that opportunity for spectation wasn't free.
If it wasn't for the in-group signalling and prestige assigned by the aforementioned, I doubt many publications would be able to stick around on the merits of their content alone. Especially if they had to depend on the oft-maligned hoi-polloi such as myself for patronage.