Watchdog Journalism Essay

The Death of Watchdog Journalism: A Comparative Look at Media Coverage in South Africa and the United States

The media has developed to become “an important player in any political system”. The evolution of media has allowed for citizens to monitor the state and its actors in a ways that was never possible prior to its existence. In an ideal world, this connection will allow for media outlets to give citizens the tools and the information to help facilitate the exposure of reprehensible actions conducted by their governing bodies, and proceed to develop a state of accountability. The purpose of this essay is to discuss why this is not always the case, and how LDC’s and Liberal Democracies suffer different obstacles in trying to attain this goal. The fundamental roles of the media are often skewed by external factors, such as the power certain states possess, news outlets that chose to sacrifice the truth for entertainment, and the elites who have the power, money and influence to alter the media content to benefit them. Whether you are located in an LDC or a Liberal Democracy, the universal obligation of the media is to the citizens by being independent parties and develop news through the watchdog method, but it is dependent on the states political situation that predicates the obstacles that the media has to go through to achieve this goal. The countries that will be used to help prove this argument will be the USA as our Liberal Democracy and South Africa as our LDC.

In the United States, media outlets began as independent journalists developing newsworthy information that facilitates the development of well-informed citizens. This

Idea has now shifted to high profile privatized media conglomerates that are more concerned wi...

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...truth” (Kovach, Rosentiel, 1). The ideas that revolve around watchdog journalism have been compromised in both liberal democracies and LDC’s. We either are in a society where attempting to hold the government accountable for its reprehensible actions could result in a decade long prison sentence, or you are in a society where news content is diluted with attempts to distract passive consumers from state discrepancies. In both societies, the faces of media conglomerates are simply marionettes to the puppeteers of elites who attempt to gain profit and exposure from the sources that are supposed to remain impartial. It has become clear the role of watchdog journalism is no longer the foundation of our present day media. Instead, the media has developed into something that citizens can no longer trust, even though they are forced to consume it each day of there lives.