The real journalism is the one that follows traditional standards for its researching, writing and dissemination of news, ensuring that these are real, that they gather enough information elements that interest the public and that these are true and verifiable.
The responsibility of the media is to provide the public with contents that allows them to learn or inform themselves of an event or a situation and, based on that knowledge, construct a better informed perception of reality.
As this is the premise that dominates the essential mission of professional journalism, the trust and credibility of the contents transmitted by the media turn out to be its best asset and hence derive the role they play in the construction of a free and well-informed society.
Professional journalism, truthful and of high quality, can not be diluted in the newest ways of social communications that are evident in all the platforms of the digital sphere, where the rules and the rigor necessary to verify when a news is false or true are often overseen, where news are not satisfactorily objective, where some are pure manipulation or manifest partiality.
In his book “What are journalists of today useful for?”, José Maria Izquierdo reminds us that there’s an unwritten contract between our society and independent journalism that grants and recognizes professional communicators “the job of monitoring those who dispose our destinies, lives and space”.
“Citizens understand – and demand – that we ask, that we investigate, that we denounce, they consider us their sentinels… and they have provided us the mechanism of alarms, stentorian noise that we should trigger every time we see some of the injustices that are common currency in our society “, said this author.
For Izquierdo, the journalist is a professional who looks for stories, that knows how to find the data and contextualize them, and finally, who has the ability to tell them in an attractive and efficient way to others.
And paraphrasing Gabriel Garcia Márquez in his definition of what a writer is, in a letter to his colleague Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, “the revolutionary duty of every journalist is to construct good journalism”, which is summarized, as I said, in a golden rule: in seeking the truth and transmitting it, in the conviction that a well-informed society will always be vigorous, free and healthy.
– Translated from spanish by Randy Rodriguez.
Director's Thoughts 