The Birth of Modern Journalism

The news today, and journalism today, is what it is because of how it used to be. Think about that for a second. Many people think that journalism today is only how it is- sometimes crazy, a lot of the time fake, and mostly dramatic- because the people have changed, or the times have changed, or the millennials, I dont know. Whatever you want to, or find yourself, blaming it on. But the news and journalism has evolved from the day it was created. It is what it is today not out of nowhere, it had to start somewhere! and that somewhere is the beginning.

In history, we have the rise of three things: the Penny Press, Yellow Journalism, and Muckrakers.
The Penny Press, according to Wikipedia, was invented in the early 1800s reporting on crime, adventure, gossip, and tragedy for dirt cheap. Literally, a penny. This made it easy for the poorer and middle class families to get hold of 'news' during that time. Yellow Journalism was a mess; it reported the news but a lot of the time it was fake news, lies, dramatized events, things that did not even happen, with an eye catching title on the front page to increase sales. The last of the bunch, Muckrakers, I would argue is the best form we had in the late 1800s and early 1900s because it was more modern and whose main focus was to expose corruption.

To compare each of these to something today, the Penny Press would be a tabloid magazine. It was just a place to go to in order to get gossip, details about celebrities, what was good in the world of entertainment, and some criminal tragedies. Yellow Journalism, the biggest thing that pops into my head to compare it to is the modern day phrase "fake news," because it was literally just that. Fake news is prevalent everywhere on every news platform during anything related to politics ever. And the Muckrakers? They remind me of people like Julian Assange... just wanting to bring peace to the world, are mature and professional, and want bad things to end, which many news sources and journalists dedicate their careers to doing.

So, if anyone is going to say that modern news is the way it is because of how crazy the times are, youre wrong. The times are crazy because modern news is crazy, first of all, and modern news has its roots in its ancient ancestors: Penny Press, Yellow Journalism, and the Muckrakers.

Now, do not get me wrong, I want to be a journalist, but the more I learn and the more I witness the news doing today, makes me scared. It also does not make me want to be a journalist, and it makes me want to hide in fear almost, at least some days. It almost seems like, if you can't or aren't reporting the truth... what is the point of a journalist? With the rising of 'fake news' and lying in media and dramatizations of things that happened, who or what can you even trust? Some days it is like pondering the question: what is life? it is just too much to think about sometimes.

With that being said, it makes me sad. I want the news, and the news should, just report the straight up facts. Nobody should be getting killed over the news, and no one should ever lose a life, a career, or deserved credibility to the news. Even sitting here writing this right now, I think to myself that even though this is an opinion piece, if it were ever published, I would get ripped to shreds. And the thing is, even if you report the facts you get ripped to shreds, and I feel like that is not fair and is not worth it. However, so many people turn to news that the fake kind gets spread even more than the real kind... or even what is left to be real. This just strikes more fear into people, and that is not their fault as consumers. Sometimes, you can read something and know it is not true, but still find yourself believing it.

I might be rambling now, but the world can be a scary place and I think as journalists were not here to scare people even more, were here to report the facts and give people all the information they need in order to form well developed and warranted opinions on the world's current events. Have you ever heard the saying 'history repeats itself?" Well, if this is not a great example of that now, I am not sure what is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUi5bsAhTk4#action=share