Beatrice Groth

News is meant to educate, inform and entertain audience from different works of life, about activities happening around them, both locally and internationally. Therefore, culture of news in a diverse society is an instrument of creation of awareness in; education, business, medison, pharmacology, fashion, religion, sports, cultural diversity and so forth. But contrary to the importance of the media in our societies, In his book The News, Alan De Botton argued that, ‘a flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything original or important – we must leave the business of – creating – to others…’ (Botton, A. 2014, p. 255).

However, to relegate news production to people of other professions, to report their own news, disregarding the professional status of journalists, arguably could be regarded as an “understatement and ignorance.” In his book “Utopia” , Sir Thomas More’s argued that, ‘…having heard of many things among us which you have not been able to consider well – then I will show how much your ignorance of our affairs has misled you…’ (More, T. 1615).  http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/more/utopia-I.html.

Finally, the primary concern of news is misconstrued to be commoditised in some quarters. But, though journalists deserve to earn a living, the primary interest of the journalist is to provide the society with quality information about activities around them which can only be objectively done by trained journalists.