Responsible Journalism

Roxanne Angeli Bagdoc

"We are a newsroom run by journalists, and our end goal is to hold the government and the private sector accountable for the public good. In order to do that, we journalists have to first hold ourselves accountable, making sure we protect no vested interests. If we do our jobs well, all Filipinos will benefit. If we do our jobs well, we will help build a better nation with more transparent processes."—Maria Ressa

Being a journalist is never easy as it may seem. There are lots of responsibilities attached as part of being one. Such issues will drag your name at stake but it is indeed your principles that are important, that you know how to offer the truth to the public without actually being biased and that you protect nothing but your credibility by being transparent in everything that you will unleash.

I was once a journalist. Truly a hard job for me being one of the editors in our school publication when I was in high school, lots of assignments to do and tasks to perform. You need to cover these and that event or activities for news writing, you do feature writing, editorials and aside from that you copy read and write headlines. It’s not that easy though I like doing it for it is my passion and I love what I’m doing. This is what I would like to say that being a journalist requires passion, a heart for serving. As I read the article “we are journalist first” by Maria Ressa one thing popped out on my mind that being a journalist that stands for the truth despite the issues that have been thrown. For her strong convictions and principles I commend her. That’s the role of a responsible journalist.

Being a journalist should see common good as their end product or goal, it is indeed upon doing your jobs well and looking forward to build a better nation with more transparent process as stated in the article.

Accordingly, stepping the rights of the other, concealing the truth and/or releasing information which is not true just for the benefit of the other will hinder us in moving forward to build a better nation.

I hope our journalists and the future ones who are next in line should take the role and responsibilities as one of those who will lift the standards of being a journalist with principles and convictions as Maria Ressa herself did that thing. We are held responsible for whatever we do or say but we, like journalists should also be held accountable in whatever story that we write. We should practice the things we acquire in our school especially in the subjects that taught and will teach us about such things.