In the introduction, I found it interesting that the authors said,
From the most isolated tribal societies in Africa, to the most distant lands in the Pacific, people shared essentially the same definition of what is news.My question to that--how? How would an australian aborgini know what a Zulu from African things is news?
But then later in the next paragraph, they explain it. According to Kovach and Rosensteil, the need to share, and the definition of what news is, satisfies a basic human impulse.
The story in the beginning of chapter 1 is interesting. I grew up in the middle of the tailend of communism, so to read what the new was like back then for people in Poland is interesting..but it does introduce a valid point that the press is for the people first and foremost, and any thing including governments have to take a back seat.
Journalism first priority is the truth? But what if the "truth" comes at a price--in other words defaming someone..look at what happened with President Johnson and his Secretary of Defense. The secretary says one thing to the people, then 8 years later, we find out the truth--it destroyed, in my opinion, both of their legacies.