By Mary Whitfill
Features Editor

I love the media. #unpopularopinion.

I think the media is the only industry that works more than it does not. I think it is the most fulfilling profession of all time and I completely understand why so many people despise it. I think the media is a perfectly reasonable thing to hate.

There are plenty of reasons that normal, sane people want to throw a shoe at media personalities every time they write another column or open their mouths, but there are an equal number of reasons as to why journalism is the most necessary field in the world.

Journalism is a public dialogue. The people who work in journalism dedicate their lives to discovering how humanity and the world work. A common complaint among media critics is journalists are all flaming liberals, and 90 percent of the time they are right. But they are right for valuable reasons.

One of the hardest things for media critics to understand is that journalists are not like you. Media people are generally liberal for the simple reason that if good writers did not feel like there needed to be a change in the world, they would not have gone into journalism. They would have gone into advertising to make twice the money and work half as hard.

The media is an essential part of the survival and functioning of our nation’s democracy. The everyday citizen needs journalists to wade through all of the misleading fluff, the political code-words and candy-coated problems – and resurface with valuable and truthful information.

Often in the world of journalism, supposedly unbiased writers and broadcasters are faulted for shoving their personal viewpoints down the throats of their audiences, but the opinion of the writer often plays little role in the development of a true news story. And I am not being naïve when I say this – it is true.

Journalists are paid to cover the news and the most interesting and eccentric events are what usually make the front page, and this is where the true fault in the media profession lies. The only crime that all media outlets are guilty of is catering too much to their audiences.

Often times the latest faux pas of popular social and political figures get more coverage than worldly and vital information, leading to a misbalance in the news. This misbalance can lead to an under informed audience who is then forced to suffer the consequences of missing out on some of the most meaningful public record.

While the media industry may not be perfect, its imperfections must be accepted because of the vital role it plays in every part of our society. The media does an outstanding job of linking the entire world to one another. Journalists have a unique way of pointing out all of the obvious ways we are different and all of the subtle ways we are exactly the same, and for that reason alone I am able to safely say that the media’s accomplishments far out weigh its imperfections.