The 1996 instructional guide for upstart reporters called The News Formula: A Concise Guide to News Writing and Reporting by Catherine C. Mitchell and Mark D. West is about how to be a real journalist, the sort we should all aspire to be:
Any display of bias, any interjection of the news writer’s feelings or opinions into a news story, hurts the contract between a newspaper and its readers. When an author expresses any sort of opinion, no matter how mild or insignificant, it becomes extremely difficult to trust the fairness of the story.
No exceptions:
What, then, are reporters supposed to do when a public official tells a lie or gives our misleading facts? … The newspaper should report the statement, without any hint of the reporter’s feelings about truth or falsehood. If the statement libels someone, of course, the newspaper must be cautious, but in the vast majority of cases in which the reporter disagrees with something a source says, he or she should simply report the statement and let readers decide about its truth for themselves.
Better crack it open and start reading.
Sarcasm!
That’s silly. If a reporter thinks a statement may be false, doesn’t he or she have the option of fact-checking that statement and presenting a rebuttal from another source? Since when is reporting lies acceptable?
Horseshit.
Fact check 24×7, beat people in the face with the truth, and consequences be damned. Journalism owes allegiance to nothing but honest truth, even if it hurts, disrupts, or the truth causes issues in being told.
Speaks volumes about what readers used to need from journalists. Or rather, what we used to be aware we needed.
well, there’s a few ways to report a statement that might be false/unprovable, whatever…
one is to just pass on the statement, as suggested in this “guide” – which pretty much makes you a mouthpiece for person making the statement,
Or, you can, just as objectively, do what the BBC (at least used to) do quite consistently, add a qualifier, such as:
Newt Gingrich claimed he had done such and such…
The administration believes this and that…
Rick Santorum asserted that he had not had a leakage during his last press conference…
Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be done?
Then if you have solid information the refutes the statement, you present that in just as objective a way – in pretty much the very next sentence/paragraph…
Journalism is nearly vanished in this country, and most of the world. Watched the wonderful “Public Speaking” documentary on Fran Lebowitz yesterday – she pretty much dismissed the news today as essentially ALL editorial, and I’d pretty much agree – from the New York Post to The Stranger.
Even beyond being almost exclusively editorial, the newsperson has injected themselves into the story – their “personality” is somehow elemental to the diffusion of the “news” – they’re there to “tell us what it means,” etc. We have, among others, Hunter Thompson, Andy Warhol, et al, to thank for that trend (Lebowitz was fair enough to call out Warhol on this even though he had given her her first big leg up).
It’s all entertainment now – everyone demands that, left, right and center – how capable would the average bloke nowadays be in processing straight news?!
Fah.
Completely unbiased, 100% objective journalism is actually a relatively recent notion. Prior to about World War II, nearly all newspapers were heavily biased. Look at any American newspaper any time throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. All of them are unabashedly biased. The Stranger is far more like traditional journalism than most people realize.
@7, I loved her remarks on news coverage in that! To her, every interjection of opinion into news was a pointless waste of energy, fluff to fill space that rightly should be taken up by….additional facts gathered through additional effort.
Add to your question about whether the average person has the ability to process old-style straight news the question of whether the average reader would want to, enough to make such newsgathering into any sort of moneymaker. Journalism isn’t a charitable operation, after all.
In the Seattle Times profile of Stranger publisher Tim Keck he straight up said the Stranger is for people who don’t want information that’s been strained through a fine mesh – his goal is to give us readers only what he called “the big chunks”. It’s worth noting Keck has always made a profit, if not a large one. More than most news outfits are managing to do.
Argh!
That’s concise, all right. But not a very good guide.
It does respond to a genuine shortcoming of present-day journalism, but it doesn’t fix the issue.
The notion that facts should somehow be avoided in favor of he said/he said “news” … wow.
@7 – so because more-or-less objective journalism is a fairly recent phenomenon it should be dismissed as an aberration? I thought the idea of being progressive was to progress? I’d consider relatively objective news progress worth making – and keeping. But I realize that what people will gravitate to is the more entertaining/editorialized/sensationalized/personalized. The fact that people gravitate to it doesn’t make it the best choice – it just makes it the model most likely to succeed, which appears to be the case.
@8 – Fran was wonderful, and spot on – and agreed “news” is no charity – and it will tend to provide what is demanded – so we have met the enemy and it is us. Nonetheless, at least to some degree, “journalism” was a counterweight to that, and believed it ought to be that, at least for a period of time… That reminds me of “Network” where the Holden character believed the news division was essentially a public service, not a profit center (“keep your goddamn hands of my news division”) – and you could argue that at least the letter of the licensing laws established for broadcasting implied that obligation as part of the deal. – but of course Faye Dunaway, Ned Beatty and Robert Duvall won out didn’t they 🙂 – and here we are!
@11, so well put. Thanks.
No question about it, there is a lot of bullshit out there masquerading as journalism. Plenty in here as well.
I find it of more use when a journalist acknowledges their relationship to the story they are reporting. When I read a news piece in which the reporter pretends she doesn’t exist, I spend all my energy trying to figure out what the angle is. Of course there is an angle, the facts were collected and story written by a person. This is not to excuse one from reporting true facts and presenting “both sides.” But when a journalist is upfront about their related thoughts and experience, I find it provides a more honest frame through which to process the facts presented.
Basically, it is _more_ fair if you are honest about your feelings and opinions, rather than pretending they do not exist.
It’s always possible to make a lie that’s more appealing than any truth could ever be. If people are getting their information from a source that gives my appealing lies equal weight with my opponent’s less-appealing truths, their natural tendency is going to be to side with me and my beautiful falsehoods. It’s like a truth-vs-bullshit version of Gresham’s Law, which predicts that the bad coins will drive out the good.
The reporter should keep his or her opinions and biases out of the story, if only to leave room for the editors and owners to insert theirs.
Would anyone argue the condition of today’s Seattle Times represents progress?