When some people think about journalists, they think of primped up people who talk to a camera or go find out which celebrities are pregnant for their job at TMZ. In truth, some journalists risk their lives for important work.
Lara Logan, CBS chief foreign correspondent, was sexually assaulted and beaten by a mob during her coverage of the celebration after President Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt. On April 20 photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros were killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack by government forces in Misrata, Libya while covering the war.
Those events occurred while journalists were on the job, doing what they love to do; report and hunt down the stories that events hide. If a writer or photographer is killed or assaulted, they get a maximum one week of coverage and then they vanish into the past as if they never existed. Why does this happen? Because they are not Kobe Bryant or Donald Trump.
Journalists need more credit for what they do every day, especially those who are willing to put their well-being on the line so the world can be “in the know” about situations that are not in our backyards.
Few who graduate with a degree in a field of communications – be it broadcasting, journalism or photojournalism – actually end up covering scandals and celebrity gossip. We journalists do not go through four years of schooling to be ridiculed for our profession. We thrive off of deadlines, newsworthiness and finding stories.
Without us, you would never know what is happening outside of your own town. We are not all investigative reporters out to expose every scandal. We are not all TMZ reporters discovering who is dating who in Hollywood. We are people with passion and drive just putting food on the table for our families.
Next time you blame a journalist for some scandal in the news, remember that without us you would have never heard about it, let alone it would not have been discovered. Without journalists this world would have hundreds of thousands of interesting and amazing phenomena occur without anyone to witness them.
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Campus Times Editorial Board.