What Am I Doing?

So I’ve been back at University for two weeks now and I’m feeling a bit down. I knew there would be bits of my course that I didn’t like – I mean hello Media Law and your boring and complex exam – but this week I was left with a profound sense of uncertainty about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

I had two lectures this week that just left me feeling downhearted. Celebrity and Spin where we were basically told that sometimes the world cares more about celebrities and who has been sleeping with whom, than about real news – or what I consider real news. In Journalism and Society our lecturer  told us that while the role of journalism and journalists used to be to act as a watchdog on the social elite, with the passage of time we have become part of the social elite, so instead of exposing their mistakes, we protect them, in order to protect ourselves.

This makes me a little sad, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows me.

I haven’t got into journalism to do fluff pieces about Paris Hilton or Cheryl Cole. I haven’t got into journalism to protect those who think they are better or more important than others. I’ve got into journalism in order to – in some small way – change the world.

There’s a huge world out there. America is edging closer and closer to electing a robot President, there’s famine in Africa, war in Syria and monks setting themselves on fire in Tibet in protest against China’s continued occupation. There are countries waking up to their first democratic governments in over half a century. The world is a huge place and people – at least in my opinion – need to know exactly how huge it is.

The social elite do need a watchdog. They need someone to call them out when they are making a mistake, or when they’ve done something wrong. There are already too many procedures in place to protect them from the consequences of their actions. They don’t need journalists to help them out as well. I don’t want to help them out. I want to hold them to account.

I know that this is just a part of my course that I have to put up with, so I can get a set of qualifications and do good. So I can do the type of journalism that I actually want to do. So I can call out those in authority when they do something stupid or criminal. So I can open people’s eyes to the world around them that they don’t want to see.

I know that this is just a phase and that in a little while I’ll bounce back and remember exactly why I wanted to go into this career in the first place.

But right now I do find myself asking. What exactly am I doing?