Kate Adie was one of the few trailblazing women who were pushing
their way into the spotlight through the dense mass of the male-dominated workforce. She began her career during the late 1960s where women were an extreme
minority in the fields of broadcasting. During an interview, she stated “When I
came into the world of work [late 1960s], women weren’t expected to do a lot of
jobs. There were still no high court judges who were women. There were no
senior policewomen. There were no women in the armed services. There were a
huge number of jobs in which women did not figure at all. I came into a world
of work where you were expected to find barriers against you”. She worked her
way through the inequality to make herself stand out and become the important broadcaster
we know her as today. She got to experience during the 1970s the legal rights
to equal pay and opportunities that were being brought in by law.
She started by
obtaining a position as a station assistant at BBC Radio Durham, and then
became a producer for Radio Bristol. She then transferred to television news where
few women were working as reporters. She was reporting for regional TV News in
Plymouth and Southampton and would join the national news team in 1976. There she
experienced resistance due to her gender where people were reluctant to accept
a woman doing this job and even assigning females to the less serious topics. When
asked about this she stated “When it came to it, all working women knew there
would be pressure anyway. You took it for granted that there would be hostile
remarks; that people would be difficult. Frequently, when you turned up with a
TV crew, somebody would ask: “Well, dear, where’s the reporter?” That was patronizing.
The assumption was that you were a personal assistant”. Most people believed
that reporting overall, especially more important topics including economics
and crime, should be left to the males yet there were some exceptions. Kate
Adie was fortunate to have the seniors of her news organization to be liberal-minded so that they allowed her to report on more essential topics. While Adie had
this advantage most women during this time did not and they were stuck with
either no work at all or left with the fluff topics.
Kate managed to be at
the right place at the right time when it came to one of her most important
covers of London’s Iranian Embassy raid. She stated that she was asked to
cover for a senior reporter during the sixth day of the siege and moments after
she arrived the SAS raided the embassy. This was considered to be her big break
and following this, she was soon dispatched to conflicts all around the globe. She
reported on many memorable events such as both Gulf Wars, four years of war in
the Balkans, and the final NATO intervention in Kosovo and elections in 2000. She
also reported the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster at Zeebrugge, the massacre
at Dunblane, the Selby rail crash, the Bologna railway station bombing, and the
Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing in 1989. These monumental and historical
events that Adie reported on showed that women were capable of reporting the
essential news and not just the fluff news. The list of crucial assignments she
completed continues with the Lockerbie bombing, multiple reports in Northern
Ireland throughout The Troubles, reported on the referendum to ratify the Good
Friday Agreement, the bombing of Tripoli by the US in 1986, the Rwandan
Genocide, and the British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War.
Shown by the immense amount of assignments Kate Adie has reported on truly
shows how not only versatile she was but how she proves how capable she was. She
completed important tasks by informing the public about these significant
topics but the fact that she was a woman being entrusted with these events was
almost as monumental as some of the events she was reporting on. This was a
great stride towards the search for equality in fields such as broadcasting
where people felt as though only a man could do that job. Kate Adie not only
proves that she was meant to be a groundbreaking reporter but that it was
possible for all other women too.
Kate Adie was also a successful
author who wrote multiple novels including her first book that examined her
life as a reporter, The Kindness of Strangers, which won the Sunday
Times bestseller list for 37 weeks. Others include Corsets to Camouflage, Nobody’s
Child, Into Danger, and Fighting the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in
World War One. On top of all the books and assignments she completed, she
also served as a judge for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Bailey’s, the
Whitbread, the Costa Prize, and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She also served as a
trustee of the Imperial War Museum and the Sunderland Football Foundation. Her importance
to the broadcasting world did not go unrecognized shown by her countless awards
and honors. Adie has honorary degrees from universities such as Newcastle,
Bath, Nottingham, Cardiff, and St Andrews. Kate Adie is also an honorary
professor of journalism at Sunderland University and was honored with a Bafta
Fellowship in 2018. Other awards she received included the Royal television
Society Reporter of the Year 1980, won the 1981 and 1990 Monte Carlo
International Golden Nymph Award, and the Richard Dimbleby BAFTA Award in 1990.
Her extensive lists of awards exhibit not only her ability to achieve this
great but the chance for all women to reach for their dreams.
Adie needed to show immeasurable
power to prove to the world that she capable of being one of the most significant
reporters even today’s patriarchal dominated society. She resigned from BBC in
2003 after being sidelined ahead of the expected conflict with Iraq. This apparently
mutual decision to step down ended her 34-year career though she continued to
work as a freelance presenter for BBC. Kate Adie was marginalized at the BBC while
working there possibly due to her outspoken criticisms of the corporation. She believes
she was been overlooked due to her bosses being “obsessed with “cute faces and
cute bottoms and nothing else in between”. This theory can be accredited by her
receiving only a peripheral role during the war in Afghanistan which appears to
have motivated her resignation. Though Kate Adie and many other influential
women worked to destroy the sexist notions that women cannot excel in these
male-dominated workforces there is still much more work to achieve.
The fact that not only are we still being deceived by the
same concepts that were created in the 19th-century but the fact
that they are advancing to such extreme levels where it is unavoidable yet rarely
noticeable. Yellow journalism is when journalism and newspapers present
exaggerated and possibly unprofessional news that lacks in research due to its
reliance on eye-catching topics. This concept has adapted itself throughout the
years to be almost indistinguishable from actual real news which is an alarming
thought. The use of flashy usually misleading headlines is unfortunately
extremely common in today’s society. Our shorter attention spans are used to
the media's
advantage by creating interesting topics that can distract us from
the truth that is right in front of us. If someone were to go online to search
for news articles it would be extremely easy to mistake an add or fake news as a
reliable news source. Advertisements have been a constant part of everyone’s life,
yet people try to avoid these adds so companies work to blend their advertisements
into the real news.
The competition that is created by the countless news
sources available to us today makes each company have to keep up with the
constant usually exaggerated news topics that are produced every day. This puts great pressure on new sources to create interesting updates and when there is
little to report they feel as though they are forced to produce fake news or
try to make minuscule topics into something much bigger. This can lead to
people obtaining inaccurate information and spreading it as facts to other
people. This is unacceptable in my eyes because the greed of some people
needing good ratings makes countless people suffer the consequences of
believing in awfully embellished ideas. This is harmful to society because it leads
people to blindly follow any information, they find which can lead to overall
ignorance and an ignorant world could create a dense community.
It is as though we have expanded on the
concept of the penny press which was tabloid-style mass-produced newspapers. The
only change that we have had throughout these years is that we have moved to
online platforms which would actually worsen the effects of its crudeness. Due to the news today being so saturated by the constant use of gore and gossip the idea of
mass-produced constant updates that are somehow always intriguing. Now with our
instant access to all types of news and information, this concept would only be
worse due to the fast-pace lives of everyone. People expect things instantly
and constantly, so the news sources feel as though they need to keep up with
our desire for updated and interesting topics every day even if there is no new
news. When there is a lack of intense and eye-catching news the sources will
stretch any information into something that we would want to read. News sources
have become more of a story-telling device than simply reporting important news
that people should be aware of. Instead, people are continuously overreacting to
non-existent problems because the news is more concerned with their ratings than
keeping the public updated. The news is supposed to be a way to stay connected
to the rest of the world but now it seems it is more of a way to hear intriguing and
heart-throbbing stories.
The embellishments and over-saturation of news that cause an
overreaction in the public because they believe that the situation is as bad as
the news state it is. This can be seen today by turning on a news station at any time and there is more of a possibility that there will be discussions about
the Coronavirus compared to anything else. Even before it became an actual
issue the media was oversaturated with constant updates and worrisome
statements about this virus.
To end this fake news, we would need muckrakers in today's
society to expose these injustices. The muckrakers were journalists who showed
the corruption found in the usually wealthy leader and corporate monopolies.We need people who work to expose the companies
who are only looking out for their own profit so we can be aware of who is
credible or not. Investigative journalism needs to be more common in today’s
society, so we can have access to unbiased news sources and avoid fake
news. To finally end the reign of yellow journalism and penny press a great
deal of work is required from journalists to create unbiased and true news and
to help society differentiate between the real and the fake.
*Overall differences and history to give an overview of the Civil War before diving into the specific topic of journalism
An individual’s personal views can always be seen affecting
how they interpret an event, and due to this bias, there tend to be multiple understandings
of the same historical situation. When dealing with people who are writing about
something that is extremely controversial there is a great chance for small
differences in their wording and overall details of that event. Due to this, there
are countless interpretations of famous and controversial events such as the Civil
War. Many individuals with varying beliefs have written about this monumental war
which would cause there to be an overflood of divergent information. Historians
have obtained a focus on examining the differences in journalism during the
Civil War between various points of view. People today are analyzing how the
journalist during that time was affected by their own personal views and how
that was transferred into their writing.
Many historians such
as Ford Risley have examined the role of the press during the Civil War and how
your location and your personal beliefs can alter how you decide to write and
interpret. Risley worked to show the disparity between a journalist in the North
compared to the South shown by how press found in the Northern states greatly
supported and exaggerated their own side while of course, the Southern press
would do the same for their side. The Northern publications “supported the
administration’s policies on virtually every issue. They beat the drum for war,
exaggerating Union victories and minimizing Union defeats”. While the Southern
side “praised the heroic efforts of soldiers and civilians, decried apathy and
disloyalty, emphasized Union problems, and explained the consequences of defeat”.
There were Northern Democratic newspapers that were found that
supported the views of the Confederacy though there were very few Southern
editors that opposed the views of the Confederacy. The Northern states had “Copperhead
publications, as they were known, virulently opposed the war. They believed the
southern states had a right to leave the Union. They also viewed slavery as a
state issue and argued that only individual states had a right to eliminate it”.
While in the Southern states “few editors dared not to support the Confederacy
in its fight with the Union. Most had been outspoken supporters of slavery and
they advocated any means of preserving the institution they believed was so
vital to maintaining the South’s economy and way of life”. There were still few in
the Southern states that criticized the Confederacy’s leaders, but it seemed that
there was more Northern support of the Confederacy than there was the opposition of
the Confederacy in Southern areas.
During this war, an immense amount of newspapers was
published though many of these publications tended to include extreme exaggerations
to compete with other competitors. These implications hurt both sides so censorship
measures were taken by both to prevent false or sensitive data from reaching
the public. This war allowed for the advancements of both side's publications to
expand to better cover complex situations such as the Civil War. The two sides
were similar in the fact that they both had the want for more news and
publications though “reporting for Northern newspapers was a logistical
struggle, it was a nightmare for the South. Telegraph and rail connections were
sparse and unreliable. Furthermore, Southern newspapers were cut off from the
Associated Press, the leading news-sharing cooperative, based in New York”. The
Southern states had a disadvantage when it came to publishing their beliefs and
findings due to the restrictions caused by the Northern areas.
It tended to be evident
on which side a newspaper supported which can be shown by “The Chester County
Times in Pennsylvania made no attempt to disguise how it felt about the
election of Abraham Lincoln as the nation’s 16th president. “A Clean Sweep!” it
exclaimed. “Corruption Ended!! The Country Redeemed! Secession is Rebuked!!!
Let the Traitors Rave!.” This is obviously a Northern state showing its
opposition to the Confederacy through the war which was the standard point of view
found in Northern journalism. There were also cases of opposition to the war
found in both sides but mostly the North which can be seen by “Republicans fashioned
the earliest dominant interpretation of Democratic opposition during the war
itself. They charged Peace Democrats with treason and disloyalty, labeled them “Copperheads”
for their scheming venomous attacks, and considered them a “fire in the rear”
materially undermining the war effort”. These Peace Democrats favored ending
the war through an immediate peace agreement with the Confederate states.
Though
there were some who opposed most tended to support the war whether it was
through their own beliefs or through fear. “Union soldiers forcibly arrested Clement
L. Vallandigham, a prominent Democratic politician, and former congressman, for
an anti-war speech which he had given a few days earlier in Mount Vernon, Ohio”.
After his conviction, President Lincoln changed his sentence from imprisonment
to banishment to the Confederacy which showed how seriously the government was
taking any opposition to the war. Most people would end up supporting the war
either due to their own beliefs or the fear instilled through the government yet
some men, especially in the Northern states, would have the strength to oppose and
become a Peace Democrat.
While there seemed to be more opposition to the war found in
the Northern states there was still some resistance in the Southern states
shown by “Wartime hardships intensified the internal divisions of the mountain South.
Many southern grew to resent the intrusion of the Confederate government with
its increased demand for volunteers and seizure of military supplies”. There
were people who were near the southern Appalachians that were divided in their loyalty
to the Confederacy which they developed a resistance to the rebel government. So,
while there were cases of Southern areas opposing the war it was also common to
find strong supporters of the Confederacy and the need for war. “Elements of opposition
to the war” in the North but claimed, without amplification, they were “not as
widespread as in the South”. This
internal division found in the Southern states could be accredited to one of
the reasons why they lost this war. “A cursory glance at the Confederacy
reveals numerous instances of bitter strife, and one who delves deeply into the
literature of the period may easily conclude that Southerners hated each other
more than they did the Yankees”. This fact would help bring evidence towards
how divided the South was and how this could help lead to the fall of the Confederacy.
The main differences in how the two sides journalism was different were that they
both tended to support and empathize with their own side more, yet both sides had
pro-war and anti-war voices with variance on their strength.
Zimbabwe has been facing an overall economic
crisis which is causing serious issues when it comes to their children’s
education. There are almost a quarter of the children not attending school due
to lack of money. The high rates of dropping out can be also attributed to the
high levels of pregnancy and long distances to school, but the overall absence
of money in this country seems to be the most extreme issue.
They
are trying to fix this by creating new laws to promote education for all
children. They have extended the necessary years of education from seven to twelve
and have reinforced this by giving a fine or jail time to any parents who do
not adhere. A law was also made where a child can not be expelled solely due to
them becoming pregnant or their inability to pay. This would eradicate countless
problems that could occur when trying to educate these children due to the need
for prioritizing money.
Parents are forced to decide whether
they want enough money to pay for food or to send their children to school. This
concept is haunting to me when comparing all the privileges that we have in the
United States. We eat too much and complain about having to go to school at all
when there are children who would not even get that opportunity. It is
extremely humbling when you hear about children not having the basic opportunities
that are so taken for granted that you would not even think about them. As a
child I would have never thought that getting an education and being well-fed
was such a blessing as it really was.
Zimbabwe has worked to make the best of
their situation by creating unregistered schools that reside mostly in the
poorest areas to provide even the least-fortunate with some sort of education. The
conditions of these schools are well below sub-par with no desks and one
textbook for the teacher, yet they are a great stride towards allowing
education for all.
Working through their drought and
economic crisis these new laws and concepts are a great start to prioritizing education.
Adding these laws should be an additive to trying to provide free basic
education to all and they cannot stop there with promoting schooling. Zimbabwe
needs to strive towards a better future where all children of all socioeconomic
statuses can receive a proper education. These new laws that were created to encourage
schooling for children are a great step in the right direction for their education,
yet nothing can be fully fixed until their overall economic standing is more
stable and decent.
It has been well-known that the Chinese government
is unjust in their restriction of their citizens, yet due to this restriction
the outside world does not know exactly what they must endure. After the
outbreak of the Coronavirus questions began to be raised about the livelihood
of the initial infected area. There has been seldom communication with the
Chinese citizens about their experience with this horrid sickness, and after
viewing this video it is now clear why.
The Chinese people are not able to
speak out, yet this one brave woman decided to risk her life to tell the world
about the injustice of her people. She states with such passion in her voice how
her government is restricting the people from speaking up by legally detaining
them including even righteous lawyers. The fact that I can hear her pain and passion
in her voice even in another language shows how much she was pushed before she
had to take a stand. She took the dangerous initiative to tell the world of her
family and her people’s unheard stories.
She says how her government most
likely conducted this illness through schemes shown by her only seeing normal
citizens getting this disease. The fact that this is happening right now is
atrocious because this should not be allowed to occur in our twenty-first
society. How can a country and its government block their citizens from not
only reaching out to tell the truth about their lives but not have medicine and
care readily available for this soon-to-be epidemic?
All these areas of people
fighting for their freedom really brings more perspective to life. People in
the United States are over-eating and complaining about irrelevant issues while
other people across the globe are fighting for their basic rights. Their right
of free speak is being greatly restricted by their government, and I completely
encourage them to continue to fight against this injustice. This video affected
me greatly because I not only saw how privileged we are in comparison but how much
power and emotion there was in her speech.
Her passion made this whole story real
to people who were unaware of how much is taken away from the people of China. The
fact that I can not understand what she is saying without the subtitles, yet I would
still be able to feel her raw passion and anger for what she was talking about.
The Chinese government needs to be stopped and changed, and this can happen by
the rest of the world not being naïve and blind to what is happening right next
to us. We are so privileged today that it seems like it is almost impossible
that this is happening even in the same century that we are in, yet it is and not
enough is being done about it. The injustice that the Chinese government is
doing towards their citizens is immoral and inhumane to the highest extent, and
we need people like this woman to sacrifice themselves to educate the rest of the
world to make a change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=51&v=LkpTJXn9_gg&feature=emb_logo
Comparing our current times to the Partisan Press Era is
moderately alarming due to their obvious parallel and lack of change.
During the Partisan Press Era there was high-power people or
organizations that would control the newspapers, and this can still be
seen to this day. It may be harder to recognize due to our ability to access
countless material and resources to find a credible source, but in that Era,
this was very limited. The local or state newspaper would be the only
source of information that you could receive or would be relevant to you
during that time so when that source is biased and focuses on advancing
themselves it becomes a dangerous issue.
Today, we can conduct research to find other sources that
would vary in what they support, or you could possibly find something
independent and not biased. This parallel is an extremely negative thing due to
the fact that we have not advanced in the aspect of partisan news sources since
this era. We should be able to read the news without worrying about who it
was made to benefit. The only difference would be that it is easier to obtain
different sources today, and that it may be harder to decide if a reading is
biased or not. Today, we are never aware of that most news online includes
or is an ad, so though there is more resources that could have different views
it is harder to decide if those sources are credible.
We make our current time more like the Partisan Era by not
caring to take more time to find other credible sources that could support or
disprove a biased opinion. We have countless ways to find accurate data,
yet most people would not go beyond looking at their social media. Social media
would most definitely be the most biased source of information which
is worrisome due to how popular this has become. We spend so much time over
social media having arguments when the legitimate information could
be found on an independent source, yet people have become so lazy that they
would much rather go off their beliefs.
It could also be amplified by the fact that
everyone thinks that their opinion is always right and feel that they do not
need to back their thoughts up. Even if people did try to certify their ideas
their confirmation bias would sully their research. Confirmation bias is when
people only search for data that would support their idea
while avoiding any conflicting ideas. People are so wrapped up
in their own world that they refuse to take a second longer to look at
everything we have available now. We are more stubborn today which leads to us
not changing our views or being more polarized in how we view things shown by
our political views being less independent or mixed.
We have countless data-driven sources that main focus
is keeping integrity and keeping their sources completely unbiased, yet we seem
to never see them included in the superficial arguments that happen today. The
world has an infinite amount of data that can be found today, yet through our
laziness we have resorted back to being relatable to the Partisan Press Era.
Nellie Bly was a trailblazer for women journalism who was
born in 1864 under the name Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She began her journalism career
at the age of 18 when she made a controversial response to an editorial piece
from the Pittsburgh Dispatch. This piece focused on the ideas that women
were meant for domestic duties, and when she submitted this powerful response, she
was offered a position at the Pittsburgh Dispatch.
At this point she adapted her pen name of Nellie Bly where
she worked to point out the inequality of the patriarchal rule. At the Dispatch
she began the start of her career as an investigative reporter where she
exposed inequalities and wrongful doings including her report on a sweatshop. There
she went undercover as a sweatshop worker where she discovered the poor working
conditions faced by those women workers.
After working at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, she felt
that her career was being limited to certain topics, so she went to work at the
New York World during 1887. This publication worked to rid yellow
journalism which focused on flashy headlines and crude exaggerations. During this
time here she experienced and wrote one of her most famous pieces involving the
cruelty of insane asylums. She committed herself to the infamous Blackwell’s Island
where she pretended to be a patient there for ten days. After finishing this
mentally scarring experience she made the inhabitable conditions that these women
lived in available to the public. The public was abhorred by the neglect and physical
abuse that was happening to these innocent mentally unstable women. This expose
and her book not only brought to light the hidden horrors of mental institutions,
but actually pushed for an investigation that lead to significant changes. Her work
lead to larger funds for their care, more physician appointments and
supervision, and more regulations to prevent overcrowding and safety hazards.
Nellie Bly not only pushed away from the normative and restricting female topics
but made significant impacts on the world around her.
Following her Asylum expose she continued to uncover improper
treatment found in places such as New York factories or jails. She also found and
exposed corruption in the state legislature and interviewed influential people
such as Emma Goldman and Susan B. Anthony.
During the time of 1889 she attempted to beat the imaginary record
from the novel Around the World in Eighty Days. She managed to complete
this task in less than seventy-three days which set an actual real-world
record.
Bly married and retired from journalism until her husband
passed away where she was left his manufacturing company. While running the
Iron Clad Manufacturing Co. she patented the first practical steel oil drum
which would be adapted to our present-day drums. She worked to enhance work
environments by including perks and benefits that were not common during this
time such as gyms and healthcare. Unfortunately, her generosity costed her too
much so she unretired from journalism where she began working for the New
York Evening Journal. During the 1920’s she reported on various important
events such as the women’s suffrage movement.
Nellie Bly was an extremely influential journalist and one
of the most important trailblazers for women during this time. She worked to
prove that women are not limited to feminine-based topics and ideas and pushed
and improved the equality and treatment of women. Nellie Bly achieved such a
large range of achievements during her life in a patriarchal ruled world which
showed that with power and dedication anything is possible.