Google: Journalism’s Saviour or Slayer?
By Samantha Vickers
On the search for more essay material, I came across a post on the popular weblog, “The Huffington Post“, entitled ‘Did Google Kill Journalism?‘. Written by Steve Rosenbum, the main argument of this piece is that since the colossal success of the US investigative TV show, 60 minutes, journalism is no longer “a calling. A public service. A mission to inform….part of the social fabric that knit us together“ Instead, it has become “a profit centre” and no longer something that “TV networks did to give back to their communities.”
Google being the demise of journalism is, in fact, the complete antithesis of what Mr. Rosenbaum is explaining. He continues his entry by illuminating the fact that without the impact of Google on the journalistic realm, such innovations as “blogging, micro-blogging, podcasting, vlogging, and lifestreaming” would only be the stuff of science fiction movies.
He ends his post by confessing that the true assassin of modern journalism is the US Government, particularly in relation to the Iraq War.
The litany of stringent rules implemented by the US government concerning the Iraq War and how and what should be reported on make it impossible for any journalist to “report what they see without being banned from covering the story.”
A perfect example of the US Government’s ‘censorship‘ can be illustrated in the “disembedding” of Zoriah Miller, a renowned war photographer, from the front line. The reason for this upheaval was the posting of a picture of a Marine killed in the bombing at Anbar on June 26th of this year. Speaking about the incident, Mr. Miller said “it seemed insane to me that the Marines would embed a war photographer and then be upset when photographs were taken of war.”
Being a budding journalist myself, I am not particularly happy about the birth of citizen journalism, through the emergence of blogs and podcasts. I feel that the traditional values of journalism should remain intact; professional journalists reporting on the world events, whilst the public taking it all in and expressing their opinions. However, I do not feel that the public should express their opinions in a fashion that could be seen as challenging, or even bettering the work of professional journalists.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that the US Government has no right at all to censor the Iraq War from it’s citizens. I mean, who gave them the right to infringe on a person’s God given right to freedom of expression as well as freedom of information?
For this reason, I’d have to say I agree with the majority of what Steve Rosenbaum has to say.
