A lengthy report worth reading is “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” a report by Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson in the Columbia Journalism Review.
What might be lost in the reconstruction is reportilng. Here are a few graphs pulled from the report:
Reporting the news means telling citizens what they would not otherwise know. “It’s so simple it sounds stupid at first, but when you think about it, it is our fundamental advantage,” says Tim McGuire, a former editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “We’ve got to tell people stuff they don’t know.”
Reporting is not something to be taken for granted. Even late in the nineteenth century, when American news reporting was well established, European journalists looked askance, particularly at the suspicious practice of interviewing. One French critic lamented disdainfully that the “spirit of inquiry and espionage” in America might be seeping into French journalism.
Independent reporting not only reveals what government or private interests appear to be doing but also what lies behind their actions. This is the watchdog function of the press—reporting that holds government officials accountable to the legal and moral standards of public service and keeps business and professional leaders accountable to society’s expectations of integrity and fairness.
Reporting the news also undergirds democracy by explaining complicated events, issues, and processes in clear language. Since 1985, explanatory reporting has had its own Pulitzer Prize category, and explanation and analysis is now part of much news and investigative reporting. It requires the ability to explain a complex situation to a broad public. News reporting also draws audiences into their communities. In America, sympathetic exposes of “how the other half lives” go back to the late nineteenth century, but what we may call “community knowledge reporting” or “social empathy reporting” has proliferated in recent decades.
Click on the headline to read the full report.
It's interesting that Leonard Downie believes it's important to tell readers "stuff they don't know" inasmuch as he violated that lofty premise in the buildup to the Iraq war. As executive editor of the Washington Post he later confessed that the paper should have given more attention to those reporters on his staff who wrote of the negatives for an invasion. The Post was one of the culprits in selling the war while burying the opposition on the inside pages, or ignoring it altogether. Was there a greater failure in not "telling people stuff they don't know." ?
ReplyDeleteAs usual, Abe makes an interesting point. It reminds me of people who get religion AFTER they get caught sinning (i.e., committing felonies).
ReplyDelete