Transcript What is Journalism, exactly? - Harding Charter Preparatory High

Separating the “pointless babble” from
valuable information
Unit 1.1
 Think
about it.
 Email
is full of spam – 70%
 In 2012, there were an average of 175 million
Tweets per day

99% were considered “pointless babble” by researchers
at Carnegie Mellon University
Source: American Press Institute
 Journalism
must be perceived as being more
valuable than most of the “stuff out there”
 That
value comes from its purpose: to
provide people with verified information they
can use to make better decisions
 It isn’t enough to find the facts, but to find
the truth behind the facts
 Partisan
Press
 Penny Press
 Muckrakers
 Yellow Journalism
 The
first newspaper produced in North
America was Publick Occurrences, Both
Foreign and Domestick, published on
September 25, 1690, by Boston printer
Benjamin Harris

The colonial government objected to Harris’s
negative tone regarding British rule, and local
ministers were offended by a report that the king
of France had had an affair with his son’s wife.
The newspaper was banned after one issue.
 An
early dominant style of American
journalism distinguished by opinion
newspapers, which generally argued one
political point of view or pushed the plan of
the particular party that subsidized the
paper
 Are papers/news outlets partisan today?
 Papers
that were a penny instead of the six
cents that was common at the time (1830s)
 The paper became more available to the
general population, not just upper class
 News and journalism became more relevant
 Papers started responding to their readers’
interests
 Relied heavily on advertising
 The
New York Sun †highlighted local events,
scandals, and police reports
 It also ran serialized stories †
 The Sun fabricated stories, including the
famous moon hoax, which reported
“scientific” evidence of life on the moon
 Writers
whose exposés of corruption in
business and government aroused public
opinion and helped spur Progressive-Era
reforms
 Muckraking efforts helped spur change in the
U.S., including the creation of several key
organization and acts
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Pure Food and Drug Act
National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People
A
newspaper style or era that peaked in the
1890s
 Emphasized
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high interest stories,
sensational crime news,
large headlines and serious reports that exposed
corruption, particularly in business and
government
†
Two
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characteristics
First were the overly dramatic—or sensational—
stories about crimes, celebrities, disasters,
scandals, and intrigue †
The second, and sometimes forgotten, legacy is
that the yellow press provided the roots for
investigative journalism: news reports that
hunted out and exposed corruption, particularly
in business and government
 San
Francisco earthquake caught on film
(1906)
 Radio Act of 1927
 First official radio station – KDKA (1920)
 Federal Communications Act (1934)
 Set
a new standard for timeliness in
reporting disasters
 Footage (LOC)
 The
Radio Act of 1927 was enacted to bring
order to the chaos of radio broadcasting.
 The Act created a Federal Radio Commission
(FRC).
 The Commission was responsible for granting
and denying licenses, and assigning
frequencies and power levels for each
licensee.
 However, the Commission was not given any
official power of censorship, although
programming could not include "obscene,
indecent, or profane language."
 Nov.
2, 1920 – world’s first commercial radio
station
 First broadcast
 They broadcast the election results from the
Harding Cox election results
 About 1,000 listeners
 And yes, Warren G. Harding won the election
 Independent
U.S. government agency and is
directly responsible to Congress
 These are the guys that keep TV “clean”
enough for viewers
 Nellie
Bly
 Upton Sinclair
 R.F. Outcault
 Will Rogers
 Dorothea Lange
 American
journalist known for her
investigative and undercover reporting
 She earned acclaim in 1887 for her exposé on
the conditions of asylum patients at
Blackwell's Island in New York City
 Achieved further fame after the New York
World sent her on a trip around the world in
1889
 His
involvement with socialism led to a
writing assignment about the plight of
workers in the meatpacking industry,
eventually resulting in the best-selling
novel The Jungle (1906)
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
Passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the
Meat Inspection Act
Although many of his later works and bids
for political office were unsuccessful,
Sinclair earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1943
for Dragon's Teeth.
 “Father
of the American Sunday Comics”
 The Yellow Kid

This comic boosted newspaper sales
 Buster
Brown
 Penned
a column for the Saturday Evening
Post that ran in newspapers across the
country
 His columns dealt with contemporary issues
from a perspective of small town morality,
emphasizing the integrity of working people
 It was a viewpoint that resonated in the
rapidly industrializing 20th century United
States
 From Oklahoma!
 Photographed
displaced farmers
during the Great Depression
 Photographed migrant workers and
often wrote captions featuring the
words of the workers themselves
 Greatly influenced documentary
photography
How to journalism like a boss
Unit 1.2
 Ethics
 Parachute
 Integrity
Journalism
 Citizen Journalism
 Propaganda
 Libel
 Slander
 Harm
limitation
 Satire
 Freedom
of Press
 SPJ
Code of Ethics
 Rules of behavior based on ideas about what
is morally good and bad – Merriam-Webster
 Ethics activity!
Journalism must be trustworthy
 The quality of being honest and having strong
moral principles; moral uprightness
 This means:
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not to sell your services for financial reward other
than the salary you receive from your employer.
not to take money from a person, group or
organization in return for ensuring their story is
covered by your news organization.
not to promote a story based on any personal, group,
or partisan interests.
not to endorse or appear to endorse any organization,
its products, activities or services.
not to promote commercial products or services.
not to promote our own media organization.
 NBC
News anchor Brian Williams lied about
his involvement in major news stories for
over a decade
 What he lied about
 What are your thoughts?
 Libel:
a published false statement that is
damaging to a person's reputation; a written
defamation
 Slander: the action or crime of making a
false spoken statement damaging to a
person's reputation
 While not a crime, these are “torts,” or
“wrongs” and are a civil matter which can
land you in court
 In
the process of reporting an issue to the
general public, journalists and reporters
must do so with great sensitivity and in such
a way that it does not harm certain groups of
people
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Children or minors
Victims of crimes
Privacy of citizens
Juvenile suspects or sexual crime victims
Suspects names prior to official charge
 The
use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or
ridicule to expose and criticize people's
stupidity or vices, particularly in the context
of contemporary politics and other topical
issues
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Editorial cartoons
Humor columns
Colbert Report, Daily Show, Last Week Tonight,
The Onion, Full Frontal
 Part
of the First Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution
 “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the
right of the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the government for a redress
of grievances.”
 Prohibits prior censorship of news by the
government, except in certain circumstances
 Tinker
v. Des Moines Independent Community
School District
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Landmark case regarding student 1st amendment
rights
Black armbands
Vietnam War
Court voted 7-2 in favor of the students
 Hazelwood
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School District v. Kuhlmeier
Principal used prior review to pull articles he felt
were “inappropriate” for the paper before it
printed
Educators did not offend the First Amendment by
exercising editorial control over the content of
student speech so long as their actions were
"reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical
concerns."
Court voted 5-3 in favor of the school district
Huge blow to student journalism
The “inappropriate” topic? Teen pregnancy
 Do
you think that topic is so scandalous
today?
 Could our student publication print a story
about students in that situation, or do you
think the administration would deem it
inappropriate?
 What would you say to them to convince
them to let you run the story?
 The
Student Press Law Center answers your
questions about student press rights
 Our
policies
 The
practice of thrusting journalists into an
area to report on a story in which the
reporter has little knowledge or experience
 The lack of knowledge and tight deadlines
often result in inaccurate or distorted news
reports, especially during breaking news
 The
collection, dissemination, and analysis of
news and information by the general public,
especially by means of the Internet
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Article Niche
Wikinews
The Rapidian (Grand Rapids, MI)
 Information,
especially of a biased or
misleading nature, used to promote or
publicize a particular political cause or point
of view
 Visual propaganda
 Types of propaganda
 Is all propaganda bad?
 The
purpose of journalism is thus to provide
citizens with the information they need to
make the best possible decisions about their
lives, their communities, their societies, and
their governments
 Just for fun: Some People Say