Journalists and the public (often looking up to journalists post-Watergate) have made journalism sound wildly more "truthy" and "neutral" than it really is, or ever was.
Unedited broadcasts of congressional proceedings isn't "journalism" --- that's a broadcast. By the same token, most 24hr news on TV, which is just commentary on some live event, is barely or often not journalism at all.
Journalists write and tell stories. Journalism offers an account of real (or supposed) events. It always involves storytelling in some degree, in the sense that an account of events (in order, or in an order which clarifies the chain of events) is constructed and presented. There's an ideal of neutrality, which is generally understood as a certain set of journalistic "practices", but journalism is ultimately storytelling with the general idea of offering an accurate account of a real event. The idea that journalists have special access to the "truth" is largely just a thing journalists say to make their job sound more specialized than it really is because it has become a "prestige" job. The same goes for 'neutrality' as a relatively recent ideal for journalists to strive for. The history of journalism is actually rife with journalists saying they weren't neutral and never tried to be.
Journalism is important, and vital to democracies, but it's important to understand and clarify why they are because journalists can hang themselves on their own petard. They're storytellers with the idea of "holding people, institutions, and the public to account" by offering the public accounts of events that happened, which the public could not immediately witness. For instance, an unedited broadcast of congressional proceedings doesn't require nor is it journalism at all because the public can just watch it. The most a journalist could do is offer context...by situating the proceedings in a chain of historical events.
I agree that unedited congressional proceedings is not journalism; however C-Span does have journalists who do not tell stories.
C-SPAN journalists host “Washington Journal” on the TV and “Washington Today” on C-SPAN Radio. They interview newsmakers, authors, and other journalists. On “Washington Today” they do summarize the day’s happenings.
But they’re not attempting to synthesize a narrative. There is no storytelling. On “Washington Journal” they let guests and callers speak for themselves with no attempts to corner them or edit them. C-SPAN shows every day a way of doing journalism that’s about the subject and not about what the journalist thinks.
Seeing as we're a tech audience, I ask you (and everyone else) this: Would anyone be happy if ext4 or NTFS "told stories" of what goes on in their file systems instead of journaling everything fact-for-fact as-is? I am happy to bet noone would be.
Journalism is (and should be) nothing more than a record of what happens or happened. A proper journalist, after all, is writing a journal. If someone is writing a story, they are a storyteller and should not be relied upon as a useful source of objective and accurate information.
In this sense, C-SPAN is as journalism as it can get: Unedited recordings and presentations of the goings-on inside Congress insofar as Congress will allow.
Ah, yes, this is also why my dictionary should solely tell me how to say words, and never tell me their definitions, since the word diction is predominantly associated with speech and comes from the Latin dictare, which is a conjugation of dicere, which means to speak.
Dictionaries have no business in providing definitions! Their business is diction!
What you've described is literal propaganda. Your description leaves our several of the core tenets of journalism, among them: independent verification and contextualization.
Unedited broadcasts of congressional proceedings isn't "journalism" --- that's a broadcast. By the same token, most 24hr news on TV, which is just commentary on some live event, is barely or often not journalism at all.
Journalists write and tell stories. Journalism offers an account of real (or supposed) events. It always involves storytelling in some degree, in the sense that an account of events (in order, or in an order which clarifies the chain of events) is constructed and presented. There's an ideal of neutrality, which is generally understood as a certain set of journalistic "practices", but journalism is ultimately storytelling with the general idea of offering an accurate account of a real event. The idea that journalists have special access to the "truth" is largely just a thing journalists say to make their job sound more specialized than it really is because it has become a "prestige" job. The same goes for 'neutrality' as a relatively recent ideal for journalists to strive for. The history of journalism is actually rife with journalists saying they weren't neutral and never tried to be.
Journalism is important, and vital to democracies, but it's important to understand and clarify why they are because journalists can hang themselves on their own petard. They're storytellers with the idea of "holding people, institutions, and the public to account" by offering the public accounts of events that happened, which the public could not immediately witness. For instance, an unedited broadcast of congressional proceedings doesn't require nor is it journalism at all because the public can just watch it. The most a journalist could do is offer context...by situating the proceedings in a chain of historical events.