Preamble: A 2023 report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc, a Chicago-based global outplacement & career transitioning firm, revealed that 17,436 job cuts took place in the media worldwide, the highest year-to-date on record.
CAN news be told without journalists? What would happen to civilisation if news flow is curtailed?
Can netizens replace professional journalists? To answer the first question, we have to go back to the earliest days of human existence.
How did humans communicate over long distances or when they couldn’t see or hear each other? We were told they used smoke and drum, among other things.
Almost everybody can make fire and beat the drum. But only a trained signal man could shape the smoke and beat the drum to report a particular event or incident.
Not every Tom, Dick and Harry can make smoke signal or beat the drum to tell a story. A signal man in an infantry unit is a highly trained person.
Similarly in the modern world. There’s only so much a netizen can do. He or she can publish in his or her social media account that there had been an accident or flooding on the highway, accompanied by a still photograph or a video.
Yes, a netizen can share with others what he or she saw but may not be in a position to expand it into a comprehensive, coherent report.
And certainly, they can’t report on official government and private sector information. For that, a person has to prove that he or she is a bona fide journalist.
In short, we need journalists to tell us news and provide us with information. No civilisation can develop and prosper without news, information and knowledge.
Netizens can contribute. They already are. But they cannot provide what a professional journalist is trained to do.
The shrinking of news outlets, the retrenchment of journalists and the growing reliance on social media do not auger well for human society.
In the context of our everyday life, a world without journalism – as the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) puts it – is a world without truth. – Oct 22, 2024
Datuk A. Kadir Jasin is a veteran journalist and blogger.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Focus Malaysia.
Main image credit: Al Jazeera via Getty Images
