For the second time this year, a journalist who had fought for the truth in reporting and informing the public has been assassinated in the name of real news.
Javier Valdez, a trailblazer in reporting the TRUTH about drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico was shot on a busy street in the northwest state of Sinaloa.
He was a correspondent for Mexican newspaper La Jornada and he was the cofounder of Riodice, a weekly newspaper founded due to the need of truth in reporting. When founded in 2003, the Mexican government controlled the majority of the news and was very opposed to any independent news organization.
Despite governmental opposition, Valdez and his colleagues were determined to continue exposing the truth.
Valdez’s coworker at La Jornada with a specialty in the field of organized crime and the cartels was shot multiple times in her car in Chihuahua, Mexico, in March of this year.
Valdez is quoted, when asked about her death, “Let them kill us all, if that is the death penalty of reporting this hell.”
When asked by a family member if he was afraid, Valdez admitted his humanity.
When asked why he continued to as he was doing, knowing he was marked for death, he said, “It is something that I like doing, and someone has to do it. You have to fight to change things.”
Jan Albert – Hootson, Mexico’s representative for CPJ truly stated that Valdez’s death was not only an attack on truth in journalism for Sinaloa, but for all of Mexico.
However, this is not just a problem particular to Mexico.
In the United States, the people are subjected to “fake news” daily.
Anderson Cooper is now in a defamation suit by a pediatric cardiac doctor in West Palm Beach Florida. Cooper skewed the mortality statistics about the doctor’s practice and ruined his cardiac program, and possibly his career. The doctor has even received death threats and malpractice suits in response to the contrived story.
Pushing aside the alleged “Trump Media Derangement Syndrome” for a moment with all the brouhaha of his slightest twitch and how it is blown all out of proportion by the mainstream, there could be more implications of finding and reporting the truth.
Award winning journalist, Michael Hastings, contributing editor to Rolling Stone, war correspondent and journalist for Buzz Feed died under mysterious conditions on June 18, 2013.
The death was ruled an accident by the LA county coroner, but he had emailed his contemporaries about a big story he was chasing and that he would be “off the radar” for a while.
Car experts are at least, half skeptical about the nature of the explosion after the crash.
Is death the price of truth as Valdez found out this week?
How hard is it to really report the truth?
Is it an impossible imposition to research sources and have a piece of journalistic data that is accurate and honest?
Is it better for a reporter’s career to go out on a mythical limb and report half-truths to get an over sensationalized story which will have to be retracted or just do their job conscientiously?
The credibility of a fabricating reporter in all probability will be damaged beyond repair.
It is easy to see how the mainstream media has painted themselves into a corner with their complete surety about the results of the 2016 Presidential Election and who the winner would be. The ensuing hilarity of their soggy boo-hoos, hate, not fair, racist speeches and disbelief is still comical and continuing.
It seems more plausible than ever to accept that many in the media are fabricating stories for sensationalism alone, casting all in their field into the same light of shameful sloth and deceit.
Is it as Sean Hannity’s tweet decried?
“Journalism is Dead!”
There are still those reporters who strive to report the truth, especially within alternative news sources that are not controlled by big corporations which have been bought and sold by their political agendas.
The truth is available, but now the burden is placed solely on the reader to seek it, weigh it and decide what to believe.
Image: Screen Grab: http://www.onenewspage.com/video/20170517/7530339/Mexicans-mourn-murdered-crime-journalist.htm
