A few weeks ago I did my last news reading at radio 1 for the year. Now I’m in Spain, time flies! I’ve been doing the radio for more than a year now. I want to become a journalist, so it only makes sense to take all the opportunities that I can now, while they’re still free. Thanks to the radio I’ve managed to meet people from other radio stations, so next year I may have a program of my own on Radio Toroa, but we will see. I will also try to write for the student mag ‘critic’.
It makes sense for me to do so, of course, after all this is what I want to do. This is me. I write, I talk, I criticize, I ask, I assess, I reason. But this is also what I want everyone else to be able to do. I want everyone to be who they are, to reach their potential. Everyone should be able to write and talk and criticize and ask; but above all to assess and reason, as these stem from the others. I’m a firm believer in equality and freedom, everyone should have a right to education and everyone should be able to use this education to make the world a fairer, better place. This is where citizen, or grassroots, journalism comes in. If every individual could publish their thoughts, by definition there would be equality and full literacy. Citizen journalism doesn’t work though. First of all not everyone has access to education because not everyone has the same opportunities. Second, there aren’t many publications that do pick up unprofessional articles. Because they are unprofessional, they are likely to have bias or be badly written. Also, they may go against what the backers of the publications believe in. This here is the most important issue. Because all publications are biased, but probably not explicitly. You can tell through hints, like when TVONE interviews little girls who don’t like teachers striking because they fear for their grades. What utter bullshit. I think if you are worrying about your grades at the age of 7, not only you but your whole family has a problem.
If people have an access to education they’ll have an improved ability to reason. With reason comes the ability to see what is good and bad. Everyone should be able to criticize what they see as bad and show their idea of good. This breaches journalism’s golden rule of objectivity, some would say. I don’t think so: I think it is much better for a journalist two expose to sides and then defend a favourite than to show one as best without actually giving arguments for the other. The latter is what actually takes place. Newspapers will say that it is bad for nurses to strike because it is putting aside the lives of millions, but not that their own lives are constantly put aside because of their services to those millions. This is why so many are wary of striking, the media gives it a bad name. I think people should be able to openly give their assessment of the world. For example, if the Taliban are again doing atrocities, we should mention the ones we do, we should mention how we do not improve Afghanistan either and how we also kill innocent people. In fact we should say that we too are taliban, that women also have less rights in our world *High Five, Diplomacy, Diplomacy, Shake Hands* We should be able to say that they don’t have education, live in poverty and have no food, maybe have a passing reference on how we have kept the country in war, and thus no education, for thirty years.
This sort of journalism is much more sentimental. And much more real. Richard Rorty defended a sentimental education, thanks to which we would feel more attached to people we do not know. We will see that they are in fact like us, but different. Highlighting the similarities, which outnumber the differences is better than doing the opposite. If everyone had the access to this sentimental education, the world would be better. Journalism should have a tinge of sentimental too, because readers like that shit, as well as exposing two sides of a story. Many of these accounts we can pick can come straight out of citizen journalists. They can provide blurbs of information which we can fit into a good article, acknowledge them and voila, the world is slightly fairer, and people happier. At least those who contributed.
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