Why Journalism

 Journalism is a career that can demand a good deal of work each day for a reporter. It can require long nights, working weekends and even over holidays. But it's something I'm willing and ready to begin. 

I had always enjoyed writing in high school. Never finding it to be as much of a hassle as my friends and other students; however, I never thought to pursue it further than classroom assignments. Entering my first year at High Point University on a pre-medical track, the extent of my writing included lab reports and a few short answer test questions. 

After completing that year, I began to question if I really wanted to stay on a pre-medical track for almost another decade of schooling. I could not come up with a reason to justify the commitment I was about to make. When people would ask me "Why do you want to be a doctor" the reason I would give them was something they wanted to hear. I could not come up with a reason for me better than "I want to make a lot of money" and I do not think I could have been happy with myself later in my life if I continued on that reason alone. 

When I thought about what I wanted to be doing in about a decade, I kept coming back to being somewhere in the world of film and entertainment. I wanted to review films, cover award shows, interview directors and write about movies and Hollywood. 

Just before I left for sophomore year, my younger brother had his first day of class in high school, with my same sophomore english teacher. He told me how she recognized he was my brother and said she had high expectations for him based on how I did in her class, which I remember to be very focused on creative writing. I think that reminded me of how much I loved writing, especially about a topic I cared about. On my third day of sophomore year, I walked into the fourth floor of Smith Library and changed my major from exercise science to journalism, and I have never looked back.

Movie Reflection: They Won't Forget

 

They Won't Forget (1937) is a film that shows both the evils of vengeance, and the role of the press in society and the justice system. We see how the press can influence both the government and the public to believe whatever they write. In the case of this film, the press was able to convince the public of a man's guilt before a trial was held, and his "investigating" was used by the government to tailor their prosecution. 

It's Confederate Memorial Day in the southern town of Flodden, and a young girl is found dead at her business school. The town's district attorney, Andrew Griffin, who hopes to be governor or in the Senate, wants to convict her teacher, William Hale, although all the evidence against him is circumstantial. Enlisting the town's leading journalist, William Brock, Griffin and Brock work together to use his reporting to rile the public up in a craze of prejudice and hatred towards Hale before his trial even begins. The press sells a prejudice angle on the story, not and objective, truthful one, in order to get the conviction they want. Griffin forces witnesses to lie on the stand to make sure Hale is found guilty. When he is, and sentenced to death, the governor commutes his sentence to life in prison, but the townspeople, who have become enraged by this take matters into their own hands and kill Hale themselves. In the final scene of the film, Hale's wife confronts Griffin and Brock accusing them of twisting the investigation to fit their needs and wants, causing at least Brock to reflect on what they have done.

The journalist in the film, Brock, is given unrestricted access to Hale's home, able to take evidence from his house to use in his reporting without alerting the investigators. When it first breaks that a girl has been murdered, Brock is interviewing some of the girl's classmates outside of the building, with a mob of people around them. He judges Hale off of one quick interaction outside the building the girl was killed in, and because Hale is in a hurry and cannot stand around to answer questions, that makes him the prime suspect in Brock's eyes. Brock's reporting focuses on making Hale the only suspect, trying to get the public to hate him enough to force a conviction. During the trial, Brock gives updates each day on the events that happened in the courtroom, but with a large bias in the District Attorney’s favor. His reporting got the public so crazed that they attacked the train transporting Hale to prison and killed him because they believed what they had been told in the paper and on the radio each day of the trial.

EOTO 1: Something I learned

 Words are not the only option for people to comment and critique politicians, public figures or events. Political cartoons have been in use for centuries to do what words cannot. Using hyperbole, metaphor and irony, political cartoons provide commentary on politics, politicians and major events in history. 

The origin of the political cartoon dates back to about 1720, and the collapse of the South Sea Company. But the first truly political cartoon in the United States was Benjamin Franklin’s “Join, or Die” cartoon in The Pennsylvania Gazette, on May 9, 1754. This cartoon featured a snake that was cut into several pieces to symbolize the colonies and their need to come together in order to defeat the British and gain their independence. 

Some famous political cartoons in history include “Don’t Tread On Me”, “A Harlot’s Progress”, Rube Goldberg's Pulitzer Prize winning, “Peace Today” and “Abe Lincoln’s Last Card or Rouge-et-Noir.” All of these cartoons seek to show the importance and the true nature of those in power through satire, irony or metaphor.

These cartoons have been used throughout not only our country’s history, but others as well. In Canada, one of the more famous political cartoons is called “No Mercy to Captives Before Quebeck,” by Geroge Townshend in 1759. 

Political cartoons are also protected by the First Amendment as they are considered a form of speech, more specifically, they are political speech and parodies, which has the highest level of protection from the First Amendment. The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) is a professional association that seeks to protect and promote the interests of cartoonists at all levels of work. The organization was founded in 1957 by a group of cartoonists led by John Stampone. Today, they have over 200 members in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Today, R.J. Matson is one of the most known political cartoonists in recent years. He is responsible for cartoons in the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump presidencies, and continues to illustrate cartoons today. 

Political cartoons are important to the conversation on different topics in our history. They are able to show us opinions on those issues, and how they really seem.

EOTO: Institutions and Publications

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Before people got their news from social media, TV, or the radio, newspapers were the dominant means, with a majority being controlled by one man, William Randolph Hearst. His important publications included The San Francisco Examiner and the New York Journal. 

The San Francisco Examiner was founded in 1863, under the name the Democratic Press, and was a pro-Confederacy paper. The office building was destroyed on June 12, 1865, after a mob attacked the paper after Lincoln's assassination, and the paper was renamed to the Daily Examiner. William Randolph Hearst's father George Hearst, bought the paper in 1880 for political reasons, and later transferred ownership to his son William in 1887 at 23 years old.

Hearst hired writers, including Mark Twain, Jack London and Ambrose Bierce to help boost the paper's quality and its popularity. He also began to focus the paper more on sensationalized news and headlines, leading to the failing newspaper to begin to turn a profit within a few years of Hearst's leadership.

In 1895, Hearst turned his focus east, buying the unsuccessful New York Morning Journal for only $180,000, again hiring talented writers to help improve the paper’s quality. Hearst changed the name to the New York Journal, and again in 1902, with the morning paper named the New York American, and the evening edition the New York Evening Journal. Hearst remade the paper to be both entertaining and affordable for the working class in an effort to get more readership and undercut his competition. It was the first paper to successfully combine graphics and photographs with writing, and it became one of the most successful papers in New York, surpassing The New York Times. 

Hearst also poached writers and the cartoon artist Richard F. Outcault, the creator of the Yellow Kid cartoons, from his former mentor Joseph Pulitzer, who owned the New York World, which started a bitter rivalry between the two papers. The New York Morning Journal and the New York World both used sensationalized headlines and reporting to try and gather more readers, and along with rivaling Yellow Kid cartoons, this led to the term yellow journalism being used to describe this practice of reporting. 

The Yellow Kid cartoon

The practice of yellow journalism reached its peak in the early years of the 20th century. Hearst’s coverage of Cuba’s independence from Spain led to an increased public awareness of the topic and pressure on the US government to step in. Ultimately leading to the Spanish-American war. 

The two editions of the New York Journal continued to flourish in the early decades of the 20th century, but even Hearst could not shield his paper from the effects of the Great Depression. The paper outlasted its former rival the New York World, which closed down in 1931, but the morning edition was forced to shut down in 1937 and combined the staff into a single evening paper, the New York Journal-American. With the rise of new technologies and new ways of reporting, daily newspapers began to fade away, and the New York Journal-American continued to print until April 28, 1966, a decade after Hearst’s death.

However, the San Francisco Examiner is still in business today after being sold by the Hearst Corporation in 2004, and then being sold three more times finally under the ownership of Clint Riley Communications. 

By 1925, Hearst owned newspapers in every region of the United States, and at the height of his power in 1935, he owned 28 newspapers, 18 magazines and multiple radio stations, movie companies and news services. His life was the inspiration for Orson Welles’ first film, Citizen Kane (1941). Hearst died on August 14, 1951. The Hearst Corporation is still one of the biggest media conglomerates in the country, owning ESPN, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and others.