News ideal may not exist anymore?

“We want to become a journalist , exposing the darkness, and achieving social justice.” That’s why most of us choose journalism as our major in the first place.

However, with time flies, after 4-year study, and internships in news agency, lots of students in China suddenly lose their trust and faith in journalism, and prefer to choose other job rather than becoming a journalist. I keep asking them why. And their answer are surprisingly consistent— their news ideal fades.

I have to admit this is a realistic problem really and frequently happening in China. We have limited freedom to post the story we wanna tell to the people. According to the world press freedom index 2023, China ranks second to last this time, even worse than the ranking in 2022, which is a very big regress of the society development.

Why is press freedom so important to a country? From my stand of point, press freedom is the foundation of the freedom of speech, and also the origin of people’s sense of security and happiness.

There is a big event happened in Fengxian, China last year. It’s a cruel tragedy of woman trafficking, which raise a lot of attention of the society. And the most surprising and unbelievable part of it is the absence of traditional media. On the contrary, the internet media played the most important and essential role in discovering the truth and posting the whole story to people. And this situation is caused because of the strict news censorship of China, journalists in traditional media institution were restricted by many rules, which largely reduced their creativity and initiative to find the truth. The opacity of truth will definitely discourage people in China. If all the people of a country keep wondering whether I will be the next girl in Fengxian, then the society will be sick for no doubt.

Also, I don’t know whether some horrible number of arrested journalists in China presented in foreign newspaper is correct or not, because it’s unavoidable for a media having its own bias. It’s because of the cultrual context which is hard to change or avoid. And I acknowledge that the national conditions are totally different in China, we can’t just apply the western journalism policy or use other countries’ creteria to judge China’s journalism, but I have to admit that the dilemma of Chinese press freedom do exist, and there is still a long way for the journalism in China to go.

Lastly, I want to say that the best way to maintain a great country image for their people, maybe is not to ban everything which is not good for the government. Every coins have two sides, and so do countries in the world. It’s impossible that every country just has their own advantages without any bad sides. So, I believe that let all different sounds and voices fly and spread, finally the truth will triumph over fallacy. People has their own judgment, and all we should do maybe is to discover the truth, display all the details of each event and trust our people.