Chronic as salvation: Teaching journalism is taught to listen and tell clearly what is heard after checking that it is true

• Main Author: Alfonso Armada
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos 2015-03-01
• Series: Index Comunicación
• Subjects: Periodismo; formación de los periodistas; crónica; ética; medios de comunicación; Journalism; training of journalists; chronicle; ethics; media
• Online Access: http://journals.sfu.ca/indexcomunicacion/index.php/indexcomunicacion/article/view/169

Teaching journalism is to teach listen and tell clearly what is heard after checking that it is true. After receiving all the opinions, and stupidly believing that all are equally valuable, we finish misleading the sense of reality. This is why the press has lost much credit, because many readers or former readers have come to the conclusion that everybody lies, that all newspapers twist reality so that it looks like their worldview, because, as ironically says a friend who tries not to lose entirely his faith in journalism: "reality is overrated". Because we mix facts and opinions, because we weaken the facts so that they say what we want them to say, and ultimately we do not know where reality ends and where fiction begins, where we practice the intellectual and moral decency or misrepresenting what we know to harm others and protect us.