Journalism and society term 2 week 6

1. JOURNALISM AND SOCIETY:
TERM 2, WEEK 6
16-02-2017
NON-LIBERTARIAN PERSPECTIVES

2. THE LECTURE
 This week was all about non-libertarian perspectives and how they relate to journalism.
WHAT IS ONE JOURNALISM?
“… the concept that there is and must be one homologous way of thinking and acting, guided by immutably and
arcane rules.”
 However It is difficult – maybe even impossible – to define journalism practice globally.
There are four theories of the press, which we have learned about before. These are:
 Libertarian
 Social responsibility
 Authoritarian
 Soviet-communist
These are the three the lecture and seminar are
focusing on since they are non-libertarian
perspectives.

3. THE LECTURE CONTINUED
 Even though there are three main non-libertarian perspectives, there are key differences between
all of them.
Social responsibility
 Citizens are well informed
 There is some censorship/self-censorship and this is to protect the community
Authoritarian
 There is public and private ownership
 The government censors content
Soviet communist
 Propaganda is still present like the authoritarian perspective, but it focuses on people’s needs
 The press is controlled by the party, it is not privately owned like it could be in an authoritarian press

4. THE SEMINAR
One of the main questions posed in the seminar was: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JOURNALISM
AND PROPAGANDA?
 First we discussed the difference between empirical and normative. Empirical is the way things are
and normative is the way things should be.
 We then went on to discuss why the libertarian model does not work, and for this, we referred back to
Herman and Chomsky’s critique.
According to Herman and Chomsky, the libertarian model does not work because of:
 Ownership of media
 Advertising
 Reliance on “official sources”
 Flak
 “Anticommunism” sentiments (today, anti-terrorism).

5. MY THOUGHTS
 In my opinion, I can understand why some countries may want censorship, to control what
people in these countries see and what should be hidden. But, I think it is unfair for some
countries such as Saudi Arabia, China and North Korea to censor things because citizens have a
right to know of some information. Also, I think citizens should receive all the facts and make up
their own mind up about certain things which the government from a particular country may
want to hide from them.
 It is nice to have different points of view about a topic instead of just one point of view, but you
cannot have that when everything is censored.
 I think in journalism you can try to write down all the facts of something without making it too
biased, and should at least try your best to keep finding the truth and be objective. Therefore, in
regards to the difference between journalism and propaganda, I feel that with propaganda, it can
be misleading and contain bias information, but I don’t think that is always the case with
journalism. With journalism, you can find different sources and find different points of views
about one particular thing.