Change Newspaper Reporting

When I was a young man about 50 years ago, we had newspaper reporters. It was their job to report news to the public through the newspapers through which they worked.. The editor of each each newspaper would also publish editorials, the primary purpose of which was to educate the newspaper readers on the significance of a particular news item.
Through the years, newspaper reporting became more sophisticated, primarily through teachings at liberal universities. Newspaper reporting became journalism. With the change in nomenclature also came a change in the fundamental position of the operator. Whereas a newspaper reporter previously reported the news, a journalist became a political activators to influence the news. In short, the input to our newspapers is no longer news reporting. Rather, it is news opinions, with intention to develop an attitude within the mind of the reader.
Some years ago, Islamic terrorists brought down two world trade center powers in New York City. The attack was based on the nebulous opinion of the terrorists that the US, and what it stood for, was a general enemy of the Islamic world. As nebulous as the idea was, the attack was realistic.
Yesterday Islamic terrorists killed 10 people in the Paris office of a newspaper. In this case, the attack seemed more justifiable from an Islamic terrorist point of view, in that the particular newspaper had previously published a derogatory caricature of the Prophet Mohammed and was continuing to verbally attack Islam.
With the change from news reporting to the political activism of journalism, the targets of the Western world have retaliated in their traditional way, which is to verbally defend their position. However, the targets of Islam respond in a completely different manner. They kill. Hence the attack on the Paris newspaper office.
There is now much in the news concerning freedom of the press and the attacks on journalists, but this has resulted in the change of ideology in newspaper reporting. A newspaper reporter was an enemy of no one. He merely reported the news. The current journalist is a political activist, who by his activism establishes enemies. In other words, the present physical danger danger to journalists arises from their own activism. In other words, physical danger goes with the territory of political activism in the Islamic world, if not in the Western world. If journalists want to reduce the probability of physical danger and the pursuit of their careers, they should seriously consider reducing their role of political activism and return to a more basic form of news reporting. Political activism can be left in the hands of career politicians.