Some journalists use the media to launch scandals in order to achieve an immediate increase in audience numbers in the face of their decline in favor of social networks. Their sensationalism, often tinged with ugly sex, attracts an increase in the worst kind of audience which, measured in quantity rather than quality, has a very different effect in the medium and long term than in the short term. In the short term, these journalists feel satisfaction or even euphoria, and even the less intelligent among them believe that this is how they can halt the decline in their audience. On the contrary, in the medium and long term, they lose their credibility in favor of social media, where anyone can always find the truth if they want to look for it and seek it out.
First, they lose their higher-quality audience, who do not like dirt entering their homes or their minds. They neither have nor want visibility in that kind of journalism, rejecting any kind of interview and only accepting them with journalists of professional and human quality. Little by little, the media outlet loses value among an increasingly diverse group of people. The society they have added to the image of their media outlet also tarnishes their professionalism until those journalists are relegated or excluded from those same media outlets.
Traditional media outlets can only survive in today’s world by offering different and better guarantees than social media. The first guarantee is to respect democracy and each of its institutions. There are journalists who make parallel media judgments and then pressure and threaten even the justice system to copy what their media outlets have already sentenced and condemned. In the case of feminism and the fight against gender violence, this lack of respect for the separation of powers has very negative consequences for victims. Another guarantee is to respect the truth, never to lie, and this is something that sensationalist journalists never do. And finally, respect for human rights values. Daily 27 was created to develop this type of journalism, which is so badly needed in today’s world.
PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the best school of education in the world