History plays a major role in the creation of journalism.  It’s been that way ever since the American Revolution in the 1760s. Countless journalists and news groups are credited with being the landmarks of journalism through out the years. Without them,  we wouldn’t have our news media like we do today.

Rodger Streitmatter came up with a list of ten recurring traits that provide methods to how journalism has grown up over time. His first traits states, “The news organizations that have influenced important events haven’t been afraid to set the agenda”

These news organizations don’t just record the facts that are given to them; they do intense research and digging into resources to come up with a story that will “lead society”. They want to change people’s minds, to get Americans talking, and get the REAL stories out to the public whether they are positive or not.

Streitmatter provides a great example of a journalist doing her own research to get down to the truth. Ida Tarbell is credited with exposing the Standard Oil Company because she did her own research with court documents and inside sources. She didn’t report on the suspicious statements from John D Rockefeller, she made her own real story.

Looking back on the past, it’s easy to say that journalism has come a long way and, in some ways, matured greatly. We never truly realize how much we depend on the news media, but it has become part of us.

America today wouldn’t be the  same without the history of journalism.

Citizenfour is a documentary created by Laura Poitras when she received an encrypted email from an anonymous person who identified himself only as “citizenfour”. We soon found out that this correspondent turns out to be Edward Snowden when Poitras and reporter Glenn Greenwald fly out to Hong Kong to meet him. It turns out that he really did have a lot of information on the governments covert-surveillance programs. They became the first recorders to be contacted by the “whistleblower” to reveal the reality of what really the NSA’s surveillance was capturing around the world. Through out the documentary, he leaks an enormous amount of top-secret information concerning the National Security Agency. He states that they pretty are spying on billions of people around the world. This film is very successful because it doesn’t try to debate whether it was right or wrong to reveal this information, instead they just state the facts. They leave the subject to speak for itself and for us to decide how we want to handle this evidence. Overall, even though the content was interesting, I was left bored because a lot of the footage just involved people typing on computers and Showden freaking out in the room. There wasn’t a whole lot of action, but it is a documentary so that’s important to keep in mind.

The 1970’s film, All the President’s Men, makes history come alive by creating a story around two journalists who try to crack the Watergate scandal that ended up getting rid of president Richard Nixon. The film follows the real-life story exactly, including the discovery of a simply break-in that actually revealed to be hatched by the White House itself. The actors that played Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did an excellent job of demonstrating just average newspaper journalists who risked their jobs, and even their lives, to reveal the truth behind the Watergate scandal that lead to the end of a president. This movie truly shows how much of an impact a journalist can create, and the extent they go just to get the whole true story. Seeing how this film was made decades ago, I thought it was going to be a boring film, but it surprisingly was quite interesting and taught me more about this scandal than any old history book ever did. Even though most people know the ending of this movie, director Alan Pakula did a great job of keeping it entraining and suspenseful while telling the real story behind this case.

Shattered Glass is a critically acclaimed story about a charming young journalist, Stephen Glass, who is suddenly labeled as a liar and becomes a disgrace. Even thought is clear right away that Glass has invented many of his stories, the director still keeps the audience intrigued with the uncertainty of what is made up by Glass and what is actually real. This film had the opportunity to be a very boring journalism movie, but surprisingly was very interesting and suspenseful. It shows what could happen in the real world, and how easy it is to get caught up in one’s imagination/lies and be torn down from it. Journalists are labeled truthful and honest, but if someone is suspicious of their work, that journalist’s credibility can easily be lost with a simple background check of the stories. I believe Hayden played this character’s part well. He represented a man who is driven to please everyone which ends up being his downfall for all the made-up stories he wrote. There were many moments where I would cringe with total embarrassment for Stephen Glass. Hayden really made it feel like he was a sorry excuse for a journalist who finally got caught. This was a very entraining movie with a well thought out plot and taught the audience an important lesson.

Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy, has a strong line of power actors that play a part in the coverage of known national story that has been a conflicting issue for several years. What the church does behind closed doors is brought into the light when the movie focuses around offenses tracing back to pedophile priests. A group of reporters, called “Spotlight”, were called in to look in deeper into a pedophile case that accused a Catholic priest. Instead they found a much bigger problem that didn’t involved just this one priest. The focus was around multiple priests, who the church was protecting while they were physically and sexually abusing children. It was the Spotlight team’s job to get the emotional stories from the abused and go against the church to bring the truth out to the public. This movie goes into the exploration of conflicts faced by journalist, and truly shows what they go through in order to get the story out. They pretty much risk everything, their reputation, their own jobs, but in the end it was all worth it.

This event was very interesting to me because I had little knowledge on the Syria Crisis. It was good to know more about it, and even a little bit more about photojournalism and why they capture certain pictures.

I believe journalism is almost like a way of living and people, if they notice it, rely  heavily upon it. Its how we get our news, our stories, the latest gossip we share with our friends. How else will we know what is going on seas or what the Kardashians are up too? Some people may believe journalism is what it use to be in the past; getting information from the newspapers. Other people, largely including the younger generation, realized journalism is moving on to bigger and better things. For me newspapers and even the TV news stations never caught my attention… it was always social media.  Even while growing up, social media was being pushed in my face because of how tech savvy it was becoming. Journalist took this into consideration and made reporting stories more interesting to catch everyone’s attention. I personally believe they can’t help themselves but to exaggerate their stories to make them seem more interesting. Everyone is always fighting for their story to be considered the “best” and most “popular”. Most stories that journalist report on are the stories most people don’t want getting out.

In the article, “’Up is Down’: Trump’s Unreality Show Echoes His Business Past”, David Barstow explains how Trump’s presidency and even business career is very unrealistic and tells more lies than we know. Trump would tell one tall tale and, thanks to the media, articles would come out deflating these so called facts he says he tells. For example, Trump claimed that the murder rate in cities was “terribly increasing”. When in fact another article stated this was completely false and that in fact the murder rate was steadily decreasing. Barstow correctly sourced the article that came up with this data. He included the name and the hyperlink that would take you directly to the website/article. Barstow did this severely times through his article to convince his readers that Trump has been unrealistic and proving his opinion with facts and data. Trump’s wealth has always been up in question and Barstow goes all the way back to his early business days to create a timeline of lies, lawsuits, secret court hearing, etc. Even a journalist professor from Duke University was quoted in this article. Being the creator of PoliticFact, Bill Adair’s opinion would matter greatly in this article and might be able to convince Barstow’s readers even more. Adair goes on to say that “Trump is a different kind of figure than we’ve ever seen before in our 10 years of fact-checking, no one has come close to Trump in the high percentage of falsehoods.” All sources and quotes presented in this article goes on to prove Barstow’s claim, making his investigation more reliable.