Have you ever gotten a security guard arrested? Freshman Ansley Kary has.
Kary is a journalism major at Taylor. She was inspired to pursue a career in journalism after taking a journalism class her freshman year of high school.
Although her school did not have a newspaper, the journalism class was a prerequisite for the school yearbook. For both the journalism class and the yearbook, she had deadlines, wrote features and even had a taste of photojournalism.
“I loved that it was kind of formatted in a way, but you could break the rules.” Kary said. “That was something my journalism teacher always kept saying, ‘Yes, these are the rules. But once you get good enough, the cool thing is you can start to break them.’ I was very inspired by that, like, I just want to one day be good enough. I can break the rules.”
The film “Shattered Glass,” was also an inspiration for Kary, after she watched it with her journalism class.
The film follows the story of former reporter Steven Glass, who once had a reputation for hard hitting stories and exposing corruption. The irony though, was that he himself was fabricating sources and lying about a large portion of the stories he covered.
“It is kind of weird that I fell in love with journalism through this,” she said. “(Glass) was not a good journalist, but it just made me want to go out there and report the truth.”
Kary was equally shocked such corruption is possible and wants to pursue a profession that allows her to counteract a flaw in the system, she said. She wants to report on corruption that hurts others in certain systems in addition to exposing malpractice in her own work field.
According to Kary, she has had this same sense of justice and hunger for truth from a very young age.
“My mom always would tell me ‘you’ve got such a strong sense of justice, but it doesn’t always work that way, it’s not always black and white,’” she said. “As I’ve grown up, I’ve realized I’m naive to think everything is black and white. There’s a ton of gray out there, even though we want to report the truth in black and white.”
In order to account for this gray area, Kary aims to report the facts in black and white and articulate clearly enough that her readers are able to navigate through the gray and reach their own conclusions.
She has already had some practice with doing her research and being able to stop malpractice on her own.
For some time, her neighborhood had been struggling with the neighborhood security guards wrongly pulling people over. They had no authority to do so or to give tickets, but were practicing it anyway, she said.
One night, she was in a car that was wrongly pulled over.
“I ended up calling the police and they showed up and arrested the security guard,” she said.
After that, she spread the story around her school, and alerted others that they too could exercise this right.
While she does not have that many other experiences in exposing corruption yet, she hopes to be able to make similar and even bigger differences as her career progresses, she said. She is driven by justice and fairness and hopes that others would be as well.
“I just want to strive to be honest,” she said. “If other people aren’t going to be honest, then make them be transparent because it’s not fair to the rest of us.”
