“Journalism is about seeking the truth and reporting it,” my teacher said just before the bell rang, indicating the end of my very first journalism class. Over the past months, the phrase that held little meaning to me in that first class of journalism, turned into something that is the basis of my passion: journalistic writing. A lot of people can write well, however, it is a journalist who has the responsibility of actually finding the most unbiased of truths and then writing about it.

What a dutiful journalist does, is not put his/her opinion into the piece, but organize an account of hardcore facts, alongside statements usually collected from relevant people, leaving it up to the audience to come up with their own understanding of what happened. The reality of almost any situation is that one can never be sure what exactly, to the last detail happened, but what a journalist can do, is come pretty well close to it. In Jodi Picoult’s book The Pact, she writes, “The truth, to Emily’s mother is that there’s no way her daughter could have been anything less than perfect. The truth, to the detective and the medical examiner, comes from an arrangement of hard evidence. That isn’t to say that the evidence may not lead them to their theory (Picoult 380). The thing about real life, is that nothing can be concluded from one source. The mother mentioned in the quotation, was stating an opinion, whereas the detective and the medical examiner was basing judgments off of plain evidence and nothing else. But in the real world one of them is almost never the whole truth. And a journalist’s compilation of all different sides and points of view in an attempt to present the most unprejudiced of information is the reason it is important to seek news and report it.

In response to a Rolling Stone’s UVA story which only presented the raped girls’ conviction of how she and some other girls were gang-raped, and no statement from the defendant’s side, The New Republic’s Rebecca Traister commented, “These are serious charges: Journalists are supposed to seek multiple perspectives on the stories they report to try to present the fullest and fairest assessment of events; this is especially true when one source is alleging that a criminal act took place.” Perspective matters. And to allow the general public to form that perspective,
after it’s own personal judgment based on the various statements, is what a journalist intends to do.
The news in past few months have highlighted the struggles journalists have to face to simply doing their job. The issues range from being arrested for trying to repot the protests for the Fergusson trial to being taken into custody for recording policemen in their cars to see if they wear seatbelts or not. It is a struggle to find the truth, the reality, and the facts in a world that tries so hard to conceal them, but that, that is what journalists do.