It’s interesting to note that most other professions in the world have a system or a body of authority that regularly evaluates whether it’s practitioners are behaving morally and according to standard while journalism does not, mainly because it had been debated whether or not journalism is  a ‘ profession or a craft’ ( as stated in the reading ). I’ve always personally saw the media and journalists as a given. They are there to objectively inform you of events happening around the world – without influence of any ideologies or political opinion. Of course, the more you look at print media around us, the more you come to realise that the aforementioned is extremely false.

As mentioned in the reading by Kovach and Rosenstial, some of the norms and principles that journalists should follow include 1) that journalism should serve as an ‘independent monitor of power’ and 2) ‘journalism’s first obligation is to the truth’ but it’s interesting to note that many tabloid newspapers often don’t follow these rules. A lot of ‘legitimate’ news coorporations try their best to stray  from aligning themselves with political opinion of ideologies however there are often one or two that end up getting caught out for not following the rules as well even though they are seen as more credible in the public eye than tabloids. Generally, as a rule of thumb, we know to take everything that comes out from tabloid newspapers with a grain of salt. But of course, this knowledge had to be developed overtime as we realised the absurdity in the nature of news stories that some tabloids would cover. Much like how Stewart and Colbert hold journalists’ accountability in how they point out when ‘inconsequential news is blown out of proportion’,  we too ( if not subconciously ) go through similar rules when evaluating news stories and holding them accountable. Perhaps Stewart and Colbert merely reinforced those rules of holding the media accountable, by doing so our subconcious evaluation turned into a conscious one. It’s also interesting to note that many news corporations are afraid of losing their audiences and often post news stories or manipulate news events in the way that we want to receive them- which completely takes the objectivity out of journalism and news media.

The need for a regulation of accountability in the news and media has never been stronger with the rise of more accessible news platforms. We can now access the news through our mobile devices, and from so many more channels that it’s often hard to decipher which stories are true or not. I think as well, we as a generation have been brought up to question everything we see in the media so we probably already are dubious of almost every news story to begin with. Its a shame that some countries don’t give enough support to press councils, who exist essentially for media accountability-  one way we can overcome this is probably to spread awareness and help the public to see the value in truthfulness in news stories.  I think the public has become accustomed to accepting everything that comes out of the news to be true that we don’t stop to question it. I myself have been guilty of it and it’s great to see that news satires are changing how we see the news. Re-evaluation of anything is always healthy.