Nowadays, people never stand still to think about the quality of the information that they absorb. The consuming of daily news has become a very important factor in our everyday lives so that most of us just accept what we read and don't look for anything else. I have time and again found out that there is more to a lot of stories than we would actually deem possible. It is in a way, as an aspiring journalist, important for me to encourage my equals to grasp the situation.

I feel that everybody is entitled to hear everything, even though this might be harmful to a company or embarrassing to a government. It is due to this that I am now trying to target other aspiring journalists to cry out against the ever-dominating factor of commercialization of the media. Money is an important issue, I am not denying that we cannot live without it, but the media is slipping more and more into the control of certain groups, thus risking bias and the retention of news.

At this time, approximately twelve large conglomerates control the so-called First World media, as stated in several media textbooks (Vivian 24-25). This means that all the newspaper, television, radio and Internet compa

"The Insider" was a movie, which came out a few years ago, and magically enough it was challenged, if not brutally attacking synergy. What did it imply? CBS didn't give its program "60 Minutes" the authorization to air a report on the tobacco industry, because it was too petrified to end up in a liability lawsuit. The argument given for them not airing the program was that it would be too expensive! A similar argument was made at ABC, which apologized, to the Philip Morris Company when faced with a potential ten billion dollar libel claim.

Synergy is the word that is used in the journalism industry to describe the implication of conglomerates in the decision making of that industry. Synergy, means the combined action of a group of people (companies, corporations etc.) to obtain a result which is more positive than if that action would have been performed individually. You hear this word being used more often in the newspaper and magazine industry, whereas previously it was only common in the television and radio industries. People talk about the importance of enticing departments to work together, to attract possible sponsors and to obtain new sources of income through "brand extensions."

"We wanted to make it clear that we didn't intend to hurt their feelings." (Columbia Journalism Review) What most of the audience wouldn't know, is that General Electrics, NBC's corporate parent, had several business interests in China which it didn't want to hurt at that time.

In the past, there have already been numerous cases of journalists that published certain articles that they weren't authorized to publish by their editors. Unfortunately, there haven't been a lot of these heroes because not everybody is very willing to jeopardize their careers for the truth. The sad thing is that the few, who actually fought to bring out the truth, lost their jobs and were not able to write with any other newspapers, or even work in the media industry because nobody trusted them anymore. It is unfair that those who actually stick their heads out always get their heads chopped off.

Bob Costas, a broadcaster for NBC during the Olympics in China, made a few perfectly reasonable comments on the network about human rights abuse in China. A few days later, an NBC spokesman issued the following statement, referring

Some common words found in the essay are:
Columbine School, Persuasion Draft, China BBC, Olympics China, Murdoch English, Electrics NBC's, Morris Company, Journalism Review, Bob Costas, English Composition, true free, industry trying enter, journalists write, aspiring journalists, commercialization media, free press, aspiring journalist, indirectly linked, china didn't, true free press, trying enter, television radio,
Approximate Word count = 1559
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)