Newsgathering and news writing are very important to me, mainly because of the line of work that I see myself going into. But I kept up with news long before I realized that journalism might be my calling. One reason is that I love history, and we would not know half of the things we know now about the past if it wasn’t for someone digging deeper into the story to find the truth.

That is something that I feel is extremely important: the true facts. It is the uncovering of unknown facts and publishing them that can change people’s opinions. For instance during World War II, few in America believed that Hitler had thought of such inhumane ways to treat people. Even the newspapers of that time would write a story about what was happening in Germany, but would bury it somewhere in the back pages in very small font they, too, seemed to deem the stories to be unfathomable. (A very good book solely on this topic is Beyond Belief, by Deborah E. Lipstadt.)

People came forward and told about the travesties that were happening in these concentration camps. Still people just could not believe that these horrific things were true. Finally when the armies stumbled across the death camps people became more aware of the deranged things that people thought to be unthinkable. Some people still did not want to believe it until they saw hard evidence, in this case pictures.

And amazingly some imbeciles still try to conjure up that it is not true and find ways to pass it off as the greatest hoax in American history. We fight this ignorance, with hard facts that journalists, historians, and survivors brought forth. Factual newsgathering is so very important. It is everyone’s right as American too not only know about a story but to know the facts about that story, so that they might come up with their own opinions and action plans.