As a reporter, I know how important deadlines are in getting out breaking stories. That is one thing that has always been a constant in this business – time.
More recently, however, with our 24 hour news feeds and broadcasts, we are bombarded with messages from the time we wake up to the time we lay down our heads to sleep.
What is the effect on the ways we make sense of the world through the media?
To answer that question, we must go back to the very roots of journalism.
The media has been there to cover events, great and small; The New York Times wrote that if American Civil War photojournalist Matthew Brady “has not brought bodies and lain them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”
Most of the time, journalists were there as bed-fellows of our American presidents covering up their flaws.
For example, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Polio was hushed up by news photographers. They always took pictures of him leaning against someone and never in his wheelchair throughout the depression and war years; John F. Kennedy’s love affairs in the White House were also hushed up even though FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a dossier on him that could have done great political damage.
Things started to change with the Vietnam War. When the American public first supported the war, the media remained supportive of the president as it always had, but when the public’s sentiments turned sour, the media was somehow to blame.
Television broadcast journalism relies on great visual news and the Vietnam War lent itself greatly to them. As the public watched horridly to images of war seemingly every night, the public turned against the war and the president who escalated it, Lyndon B. Johnson.
The media was never to be the same again.
Other stories came their way: Watergate and the Pentagon Papers leak in the 1960s and 1970s. Media coverage of President Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliance with an aide made Monica Lewinski into a household name and almost toppled his presidency.
Last year, Wikileaks threatened to undermine American foreign policy and the way the State Department carries out its policies by leaking several thousand diplomatic cables to the mainstream media.
Twenty-four hour news may be a mixed blessing. For one thing, the media has an obligation to let the public know what is going on, to cover the news thoroughly and accurately.
What is sometimes overlooked is who the media works for – the people – just to beat the competition in getting to be the first to break a story. In their rush to be the first, the media may unintentionally hurt the fabric of American life and the people the media represents.
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