As many of you know, I am a broadcast journalism student. My main goal is to become an NFL sideline reporter or a news anchor at a major news station. I've never been fond of reporting, but I know I will have to do it in the near future in order to obtain these goals.
If you are a reporter, you're pretty much given a timeline to go out and capture a story on things that are happening in the community. Usually, you're given a couple of hours to create a story around a certain topic or event. This could be over anything: a sports event, a person, a natural disaster, or my least favorite politics.
If it is up to me, I will refuse to report on politics.
Now, I realize that I will have to at some point in my career, but it will always be my last choice. Many of my friends are majoring in political-related fields. They want to end up in Washington D.C. amidst all of the action that our nation's capital brings with it. I promise you, you will never see me in front of the White House or on the stairs of Capitol Hill reporting the latest events that just went down. That just doesn't interest me in any way.
The way that the media portrays politics today is a total mess. Reporters don't tell the truth, they look for drama pieces in order to get good ratings, and overexaggerate stories.
It is hard to believe anything you see on the news regarding politics, the government, or our President due to these issues. It's to the point where the President has taken to Twitter in order to clear up or correct what the media has put out there. That's just sad. The media's job is to inform its audience on what's going on in our country and around the world, but instead, reporters are being told what to say and news stations are busy being in competition with one another.
Due to these matters, I'm often asked why I chose the major that I did. I'm told "good luck," get weird looks, and people beg me to "just report the truth" when I get into the field.
I've had multiple people ask me to write articles about politics. They want me to give my opinions on certain matters or people, they want me to tell the stories or pick apart candidates running for office, or they want me to debate certain issues. First of all, all of those things would take a lot of research and fact-check on my part. Second of all, I literally have no interest in it whatsoever.
Yeah I make sure to vote and I discuss politics with my family and friends, but that's as far as I'm hoping I will ever have to take it.
