Line of the day

The Line of the Day comes again from Dean Barnett at HughHewitt.com in response to the musings of Glenn Greenwald. Glenn's thesis in a nutshell is that newspapers exist to check the power of government. You can read the entire piece linked by Dean in his post but here is the line of the day:

I have always thought that the “core function that newspapers are intended to perform” was to report the freakin’ news!

Yes, a concept so simple that you'd think it never need stating. Alas, however it seemed to elude Greenwald. The point however was not lost on commenters though, sadly, an Attack of the Contrarians (read: trolls) turned the comment thread into an exhibition on how to skewer strawmen. This comment from aurorawatcher, a once and future news reporter, pretty much sums Dean's point up nicely with the weight of experience behind it:


Journalistic ethics

I used to be a reporter and Barnett has a point. The purpose of journalism is to report the news -- all sides of it where available. Anytime a reporter injects their own personal opinion into an article, they are writing an editorial, not the news. Journalism's job is not to be adversarial, but to be thorough. That may sometime be perceived as adversarial by some parties, but that's their problem.An example -- in college, I covered the story of a rape on campus. The student newspaper and the local community press were not notified of this. A friend tipped me off because he had found the victim weeping in a dormitory stairwell. Campus Security told me that the rapist, who was unidentified, was "not a student based upon the victim's description." I could have stopped there since I didn't have access to the victim, but I knew what dorm the rape had taken place in, so I interviewed the residents. I found out that there had been a series of rapes and that at least one student had been stalked. I followed the leads. I reported the facts. Much as I wanted to, I made no judgments in my article about whether Campus Security was doing an adequate job of protecting the students and informing the public. Campus Security's chief contacted my editor grumbling that I had "overstepped" my authority and was told that I had acted as a reporter should, and a couple of days later, the Alaska State Troopers (alerted by my fair and balanced article) launched their own investigation that found that the rapist/stalker was a University student living in the same dorm complex as his victims. I was later told by a Trooper captain I took a class with that my non-antagonistic approach had been what caught his attention and made him assign officers to the case. Had I seemed partisan and challenging, I would have seemed to have an agenda against Campus Security and the State Troopers might have opted to remain out of the investigation altogether.A free and fair press is the best weapon against tyranny, but only if the press remains as fair as it is free. Partisan politics has no place in a newspaper or broadcast report. Journalists have made themselves ineffective with their agenda-driven opinion and the only solution is for them to return to fair and balanced reporting.It's not about which side a reporter agrees with. It's only about what the facts are and the facts will speak for themselves.

Working at a paper now, though it be a small market entity, and having observed the editorial staff in action for over a year, I would agree with both aurora and Dean. Greenwald's use of the term "adversarial" is too open to interpretation to be clear in the context used.

The press exists, first and foremost, to gather, aggregate appropriately and publish information. Papers can and do take an "adversarial" stance often--it's called the editorial page. That is where the injection of pure opinion is allowed and frankly, welcome. Interjections of reporting assumptions about motivations and actions is wholly inappropriate in straight news reporting.

Sadly, much of the national press has forgotten or chosen to ignore such a basic tenet of journalism.