Journalists are said to have a social responsibility to report unbiased truth in the media. The following discussion will look at the role of a journalist in a social and political sense. Niall Lucy’s article titled ‘Tabloid Deconstruction’ has been used a point of discussion and explores the authority given to journalists. Journalists if they choose to do so have the power to manipulate a story using particular words or phrases that reflects a certain point of view, but it is the role of the journalist to report a story in an unbiased fashion.
Lucy equates journalism to photography in that as a photograph attempts to capture a moment or scene as a visual, journalism tries to do the same thing in a textual form. As he describes in the ‘Children Overboard’ affair, just as photographs can be cropped and edited to make a certain scenario seem real, so can a situation be manipulated by a journalist or writer through text. Journalists are seen to have a moral obligation to tell a story in an unbiased way, but as Lucy describes in different scenarios, this is not always the case. We as the public are lead to believe that what we read and see in the media is the absolute truth, in this way the authority of a journalist is political as they have an ethical duty to perform to the public.
The film ‘State of Play’ supports the idea that journalists have a social responsibility to report an unbiased truth. This can sometimes be seen to be under threat in different scenarios: 1) when journalists are not provided with all the facts related to a story, 2) when a journalist has a personal link to, or opinion of a story which could affect what is shown in the media. The film often portrays journalists as aggressive when it comes to reporting a story. It seems that the story comes first, and whatever can be done to retrieve facts should be, however unethical it may be. Russel Crowe’s character in particular in many cases breaks the rules in order to write his story. Not only that, he does so knowing that police officers and people who control evidence are observing him.
As a rule, journalists have the responsibility to report facts in an ethical and unbiased fashion. However the public sometimes needs to be careful in deciding if what they are viewing is the absolute truth, or the opinion of one individual.
