Response to : News and Advertising Industries: All the
News That Fit
I confess that I did not like the staff at
the advertising department when I worked as a reporter. It was not simply for
my personal preference, but more by my professional value as a journalist. As
the article elaborated the influence of the advertising on the news content, I
believed that their direct or indirect influence on news contents exist and
they would hurt the core values of journalism, such as objectivity and its role
as watchdog. I do still believe that they have negative effect on the high
quality of journalism.
While reading the article, ‘News and
Advertising Industries: All the News That Fits’, I sensed that the symbiotic
relationship between news contents and advertising is more closed related to
each other than I expected. Subjective news articles are presented in a name of
objectivity. It is because objectivity is a normative rule that nobody can deny
even though nobody believes in the existence of objectivity. In terms of
objectivity, I am not talking about technical ‘fair and balance’, but more
about subjective human nature.
In light of
that, the principle of ‘serving for community’ that many local papers claim can
be another normative rule that anyone welcomes. But, ‘serving for community’
can be an elusive slogan just like objectivity. As objectivity cannot exist due
to the subjective human nature, ‘serving for community’ is constrained to the
financial structure of news media. Since geographical boundary is set up for
most of local newspapers, more emphasis on local community benefits the
advertisers. Advertisers are not only just purchasers of newspapers, but they
are also leading business leaders in the local community. Therefore, covering
their stories can be closely related to the advertising revenues for the
newspapers.
It will be
worthy to take a look at the structural constraint to which news media lie in
understanding how organizations behave in the market. It is hard to admit that autonomous
journalists are bounded to structural limitations. But, better journalism will
be achieved by understanding where we are locked in, thinking free from
normative rule of thumb.
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