History and journalism have an obvious connection, but there are many reasons why. Since the beginning of time, journalism has been effecting the way of history. Roger Streitmatter emphasizes in Chapter 17 how connected the two are. He explains how journalism has defined our country through a list of ten characteristics. Within these characteristics there is the idea of how journalists have stood up for what they believe in against people. They also have steered away from the pack to write about topics that aren’t so common. However, he also explains that the least admirable trait of journalists recording history is the way they “ignore or malign historically underrepresented segments of society.” Journalists don’t always get it right, but whatever they are reporting always has some kind of chain reaction that has effected history either in small or big way.

Spotlight tells the story of a team of investigative journalists diving into the narrative of a religious-driven cover-up of priest mistreatment under the Roman Catholic church. In the Catholic stronghold that is Boston, the people place their religion over all else; a journalistic endeavor takes the “spotlight” team into secrets decades removed from the public eye. Revealing it would mean a severe blow to the establishment and no one along the way seems to want to steer them in the right direction. It requires this brave team of journalists from the Boston Globe to shed light on the sins from their past. The chain of Catholic command does not seem to end but that does not stop newly appointed editor Marty Baron from uncovering the truth. Overall, this film is definitely a must see. With the fast pace of the film it seemed to always keep me on my toes, while the scandal was uncovering. The film does a great job of portraying investigative journalism.

“All the President’s Men” film concentrated on the Watergate conspiracy and how two journalists uncovered the scandal. The film does an excellent job of showing how to conduct real life investigative journalism. I believe that this film was meant to be suspenseful and intriguing, which it was for most scenes. The two journalist, Woodward and Bernstein, never gave up when leads came to dead ends. They were outnumbered by the government and that did not stop them to figure out what actually happened.

Before watching the film, I did some research on the Watergate scandal. Learning more about what happened gave me some background information. Incorporating a real life mystery helped create an emotional appeal throughout. Overall, the two journalist were able to stick with their leads and portrayed amazing investigative journalism.

I’m not a fan of documentary movies because they are typically boring, you know the story, and how it ends. With “Citizenfour” that was not the case.  It was a riveting “real life” concerning thriller that I could not stop watching even though it was filmed in a hotel room with a boring white setting over several days for most of the movie. I was aware of the story through the news media but I feel after watching the documentary that it was an entirely different chain of events. It was an extremely interesting movie and made me realize media can influence you.  However, there are many different sides of the story or chain of events.

Immediately, in the beginning I made of connection to the movie because one of my favorite TV shows was “Person of Interest.” This documentary validated my fictional show that everyone is being watched even “ordinary people.” As the movie progressed and laid out the story, I was concerned that our virtual ‘footprint’ can be linked in so many ways.

This documentary was profoundly chilling in its detail and left you with more questions than answers. Is Snowden a traitor, a hero, or did he make awareness of the surveillance issue. The ending of the documentary left me wanting and to know more. Where he is now, left me concerned that I’m being watched, and where does it go from here. This is a must see documentary!

Before the start of the semester, I would have thought that journalism was simple and just telling the news, but now my opinion has changed. First, I have realized that there are many ways to tell a news story. Some types of journalism that I learned about through this class were investigative journalism and visual journalism. Investigative journalism is when a reporter focuses on some type of topic and simply investigates it. Visual journalism is one of my favorites because I like to think that a “picture is worth a 1,000 words.” Combing a picture with writing enhances a story.

Another element to journalism or how news is told that intrigued me was the seven news values. After going through the semester, reading news articles I was able to pick out why the news article was being published. Whether it was timeliness, impact, conflict, prominence, proximity, oddity, or human interest taking this course allowed me to understand these seven news values that help create news stories.

The last element to how news is told that is important is understanding fake news. News can be told in many ways and sometimes the information that is provided is false and only published to mislead readers. Through this course understanding fake news made it easier to distinguish what was real and what was not. Journalism 200 was able to turn me into a highly news literate person when reading news stories because I felt in control of news media influence and throughout the semester I had a mindful thought process.

Overall, news is more complicated than I once thought and that news takes time to develop a thoughtful story to release to the public. I respect journalists because they pour their heart out to create the best news story.

An article from ProPublica, by Joaquin Sapien and Joe Sexton, discusses possible jury contamination in the Eatn Patz murder case. Within the article, the authors mention how there had been a trial already for Etan’s murder and how it ended in a mistrial. The second trial eventually started and jurors from the first trial attended the second trial. The judge did not want jury members to know that there was a trial before this, but a court officer had told jurors about previous jury members attending the trial. Friendships occurred within both jury sets and this set off suspicion in the court room. The sources that were used within this article was ProPublica and Newsday. The authors changed names of specific jury members to hide their identity.

Tysen Benz, 11-years-old, commits suicide after hearing that his 13-year-old girlfriend committed suicide. Apparently, the comments posted to social media about the 13-year-old girl was false and she did not commit suicide. Corey Williams, the author of the article; Michigan boy, 11, hangs himself after social media prank; juvenile charged, discusses how Tysen responded to the false accusations that he was going to kill himself and no one did anything about it. Social media is a big aspect in teens lives and when false comments arise on social media outlets, peoples reputations will be ruined. That is exactly what happened to the juvenile that was charged for the cyberbullying crime. Creating false statements and posting them on social media outlets will definitely have its consequences. In this case, the consequences were large resulting in one death and someone receiving criminal charges.

An article from the Washington Post discusses how people still look down upon someone who is getting an abortion, even if it is necessary. Robin Utz tells her story about her abortion process. First, she goes on to tell her audience that it took her years to become pregnant and when her in-vitro fertilization was successful, she was overwhelmed with joy. Sadly, Robin received news that her baby girl had a disease that was 100 percent fatal because of such an early onset. Robin and her husband decided to terminate their baby’s life, but in the least painful way as possible. She then goes on to describe how in Missouri, the state she lives in, abortion is looked down upon. Robin had to sign a statement that recognized she heard the baby’s heart beat. The purpose of her article was to get people to understand who could be affected if we keep defunding Plan Parenthood or totally outlaw abortions. Overall, people’s opinions shouldn’t matter and the choice to receive and abortion should be in the hand of the carrier and the medical doctors. This topic has a lot of strong beliefs and Robin’s story can bring emotions to anyone about the topic.

Today I went to listen to Jay Rosen speak about Donald Trump and how he negatively effects the press. He begins by stating that this is a dark time for American Journalism and there are many reasons why. Although Rosen discusses about twenty reasons with us, I picked out a few that were extremely intriguing. The first being that there is low trust in the press. This does not necessarily mean that the stories are not real, people just do not trust the people relaying the news. Another reason that this is a dark time for American Journalism is because this career path concentrates on expensive cities on the coast. More money, more talent, and more investments are put into expensive cities. This makes it harder for people to move up in the journalism industry. The final reason I would like to bring up is that Trump cannot be fact checked. This means nothing can stop the President. Going to see Jay Rosen today really opened my eyes to this career field and how much harder it really is.