Honesty in Journalism

Kathleen Parker has a sure amount of style and voice when it comes to her pieces in the Washington Post. She brings a lot of honesty to the table, and it makes for a sure set of intersecting articles for the reader. She not only challenges people in her articles who work at the public sphere, such as Romney, Obama, their wives, and other political figures; she also challenges the reader with their own actions and thought processes.

Parker will be here on Thursday, talking about the news in an age of twitter and social media. When I first signed up for twitter about a year ago, I worried about one main thing. I thought people would judge me for having a twitter and being too self-involved, and in particular I thought older people would just see me as another example of a younger generation, who only cares for their own life and self. Parker mentions this aspect of narcissism in The likability trap’ when she writes, “This ridiculous matrix for assessing a candidate’s qualifications for office is the inevitable offspring of the cultural coupling of narcissism and attention-deficit disorder, otherwise defined as an inability to think for more than two minutes about anything more complicated than oneself.” In this piece she writes about the apparent importance of likability in a presidential candidate, and I thought it was such an interesting quote just because it made me as a reader think about my own thoughts on this topic. And paired with my own narcissistic tendencies due to Facebook or twitter, I thought this quote to be a little true. However, with this new use of twitter for use of the news, I believe twitter can actually help people to care more about others and the news, if they use twitter in the right way. I suppose we will have to hear from Ms. Parker herself on this matter.

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