What is a Journalist?

I believe in the profession of journalism.

I believe in telling the truth within the scope of journalism.

I believe in a journalist’s ability to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the unbiased truth.

Does this sound like a testimony in church yet?

I believe in journalism the same way I believe in my religion. It is mostly through faith, with some scattered incidents and miracles, that I am kept believing.

Journalists have been a trusted source of truth since near the beginnings of our nation. It was partly through publications like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense that the people of America were rallied. And it was through newspapers and journals that people were kept informed about their government and their leaders once America was a nation.

This, by the way, is my nice and flowery way of saying that journalism is what keeps our country alive, and if the professionals within it ever cease to tell the truth, I believe our nation will whither.

Forget all those checks and balances you learned about in your government class in twelfth grade. I’m sorry that I have to tell you that you didn’t really have to learn about the intricate twists and turns of a supergovernment—the three branches tangling with one another like an intricate dance, trying to skip around one another and then trying to keep the other two in check as well. If you knew about the news media by twelfth grade, you already knew everything you needed to know about checks and balances.

A free press is one of the strongest checks on our government today, as it was two hundred years ago. I mean, hey, I’d behave too if I knew that the veritable hounds were at my heels, ready and willing to report any misstep or abuse of power the moment they detected it.

Freedom of the press was assured in the First Amendment, right under where they said we have freedom of religion. In essence, Journalism was second on the long list of priorities our Founding Fathers had. And although some of them later changed their tune (i.e. Thomas Jefferson referring to the press as a menace after he was inaugurated and had to deal with them for a few years.), I believe that the Founding Fathers saw the necessity of a free press in a democracy.

Besides being the public’s watchdogs, journalists keep the government in check simply by telling all of the truth.

Democracy is, by definition, the ability of the public to choose one’s leaders and laws. Choices cannot be made without different options available. And real decisions cannot be reached without the information behind them. Without journalists providing coverage of all the options available to citizens, agency in our nation, and therefore democracy itself, is a bad joke.

And as far as telling all the truth goes, journalists have yet another hefty burden. To give voice to those who are too ___________ to do it for themselves. You can fill in the blank with whatever word you choose—poor, uneducated, unaware of their resources, tired, literate, incompetent, fluent. It all comes down to the same thing: giving a voice to the voiceless.

Journalists, as it says in the Journalist’s Creed, should only write what [they] hold in their hearts to be true.

When I read this last sentence aloud my roommate, she says, “That’s the sissy lala version of journalism. In reality, you have to write what someone else tells you to write, whether or not you hold it to be true.”

Well, in a rather disenchanted sense, what she says is true. It is sort of a sissy lala way of thinking. What am I trying to do here, paint journalists as heroes that defend our nation’s freedom, as bards that sing untold stories of suffering, and as watchdogs that keep our nation’s leaders in check? Next I’ll be claiming that journalists strut around in full body armor, riding white chargers to press conferences, or that they commonly stop speeding trains with their bare hands.

Well, they don’t. That’s Chuck Norris’s job.

But despite the apparent unreality of it, I do believe in those things I claimed journalists to be. I do believe that, to truly follow the profession of journalism, one must write as a gentleman(lady) writes: the truth, but nothing one wouldn’t say aloud. I do believe that journalism is one of the many reasons that our democracy exists, and one of the most fundamental.

I do believe that journalists have a responsibility first to the truth, and second to the people. That journalists are performing a service for their people every time they write.

I do believe that journalists should and do seek out those people who do not have the power to tell their own stories, and that it is their responsibility to share those stories. I do believe that true journalism is independent of those it covers. I do believe that journalists must tell the truth.

And yes, I do believe in the profession of journalism.