Roles and Responsibilities

Journalists assume a laundry-list of roles: watchdogs, investigators, moderators, entertainers, analysts, informers, editors, commentators, and advertisers. In many ways we are community activists, agenda-setters, and voices for the voiceless. We are public servants, keepers of public record, protectors of democracy, and promoters of public dialogue. In large part, we are defined by the journalism we produce and the function that our journalism serves for society.

Yet for all of these roles – roles of the utmost importance and impact – they come with no license, no certification, and no credentials. Nor are they by any means exclusive to those with training; the profession’s poster boy, Joseph Pulitzer, is a testament to as much.

Nevertheless, journalism is undoubtedly given the distinction of a profession – an esteem typically reserved for those occupations entailing extensive training, mastery of specific and specialized knowledge, and, more often that not, formal licensure or certification. With such professional status and recognition comes the journalism industry’s concern in the rise of citizen, grassroots, and participatory journalism; efforts which emphasize the inclusion of the general audience in the creation of news content. Such models of journalism, and the technologies that have aided their evolution, seek to break down the barrier between professional and amateur journalist and further blur the lines of just who is capable of practicing journalism. Dan Gillmor comments on these consequences in his book We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.

It in this debate over the distinction of who is a journalist that the answer to the journalist’s role can be best understood. The overarching role of the journalist, first time citizen contributor or career New York Times correspondent, is all of the aforementioned functions from the opening. It is to use news, in the broadest of interpretations, for any one of those many powerful purposes through any one of a number of ways; to rank each function’s value in some sort of hierarchy would be as insufficient as it would be impossible.

However, the role of the professional journalist then does deviate from that of the recreational – the professional’s role is to do so responsibly. This obligation is well engrained in the institution. Through education, professional associations, and the profession’s deep-rooted culture, notions of fairness, accuracy, objectivity, transparency, and accountability are upheld.

The citizen journalist, who quite literally practices journalism, is held to no such standards. The information they produce is consumed with no such expectation for ethics and the degree of trustworthiness readers place in it is reflected by this.

Why we as professional journalists worry so much over their encroachment on our sacred ground then is beyond me. So what if our society has an appetite for entertaining glorified gossip and the speculation of truth; it’s good for our imaginations and the development of good judgment. At the end of the day, when those same readers want to know who to vote for in the upcoming election or what the mayor had to say about the recent weather emergency, they turn to us, the professionals.

An appropriate analogy can be drawn in the field of medicine. In theory, anyone can practice medicine. Joe Schmoe can treat a wound and Jane Doe can administer a physical. But when it comes to diagnosing a potentially cancerous growth or delivering a child, most if not all would opt for the experience, access to resources, and authority of the professional.

So long as we uphold the quality of our product and the processes that go into it its formation, professional journalists will always have the upper-hand in the one thing that matters most in our profession: truth. No matter how critical or cynical the public may pretend to be with the “media,” they nevertheless continue to grant implicit trust in what we report as truth.

While public relations tries its best to disrupt this trust through the disguising of propaganda and a few bad seeds try their best to ruin it for the rest of us (see: Jayson Blair, Jason Leopold, etc.), the credibility of the profession remains intact if not largely indelible. This isn’t to say irreversible damage can’t be done over the course of time; wide-scale disregard for these very roles as professionals, and the principles that police them, would certainly do the trick. But after all, there is a certain protection that comes from the role of the professional journalist: it’s such an important role, it can’t be readily replaced. Not by the internet and certainly not by an army of untrained novices.