A Non-Partisan View of the World

    I recently had the opportunity to host a Global Initiatives Program Event featuring Mr. Terry McCarthy, a journalist who has traveled across the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America for TIME magazine, ABC News, and CBS News. Prior to the event I was able to watch Mr. McCarthy's TED Talk on the cost of war, which he spoke about during the event as well as a focus on effective non-partisan journalism.

    During the event Mr. McCarthy shared about his experience as a journalist in the Middle East, especially the lengths the United States went to to protect their reporters and effectively keep them in a bubble, and how in doing this the United States stopped journalists like Terry from asking the questions they wanted to the people they wanted. The true extent of this bubble surprised me, because as a consumer of news I wasn't aware of just how limited stories coming out of places like Afghanistan and Iraq were.

    Mr. McCarthy went on to talk about the importance of non-partisan journalism and effective measures to take to try an remain non-partisan as a reporter or reader of news. Terry explained non-partisan journalism as always seeing two sides to a story, and how this tactic was becoming more and more endangered in modern-day journalism as employers are forcing journalists to take up an opinion to sell news. I found his comment that "even if you have your own beliefs or align with certain news sources, you are hurting yourself if you aren’t seeing those two sides to a story before using your instincts to make up your mind," particularly significant as I personally often rely on one or two sources for my news intake, thus limiting my ability to see both sides of each story. I really appreciated Mr. McCarthy taking the time to speak to us an dI will absolutely be thinking about his words as I continue interacting with media and the news.