Some people must be wondering why I hate journalism.
The short answer is that I do not hate journalism at all.
I do not hate journalism at all. Some the writers that I respect the most (Mark Bowden, Jules Crittenden, Michael Yon) are journalists. I respect the journalistic approach and journalistic ethics. So why am I so critical of modern journalism?
The problem is that I believe in a spirit of journalism that I believe is missing from most modern reporting. When I think of journalism, I think of a pursuit that is involved, activist, and passionate by its very nature. I believe in a journalism that believes its job is to do something more than just present facts; its job is to make people pay attention by showing them what is wrong and how it can be fixed.
I believe in a swashbuckling, privateer, bardic kind of journalism that is as much storytelling as it is objective reporting. I believe in a journalism that is active, energetic, and involved. I believe in a journalism that gets attention because it cannot be ignored as much because it inspires as because it tells the whole story.
So why am I so hard on journalism? Because I believe that what is missing from most modern journalism is the very kind of spirit I have just described and because modern journalism claims this spirit has no place in modern reporting.
Modern journalism was recently described to me as a sterile journal of what has happened--journalism as the first draft of history. As I see it, this description cuts to the heart of the whole problem: why so many people just do not care.
From my view, this sterile journal forgets the essence of the journalist. Journalists are humans just like everyone else. They are citizens just like everyone else. What separates journalists from everyone else is their desire to shine the light of intellect on the truth for their fellow humans and citizens.
This light is not sterile or neutral even as it is objective and fair. I believe that a recent ongoing story in Ohio proves my point:
Marc Dann was Ohio’s elected attorney general who was recently forced to resign because of a series of findings of unethical conduct and ongoing investigations into allegations of even more. My local paper’s coverage of this ordeal has been good--I would say just short of outstanding.
This coverage, I believe, proves my point because of its very nature. The reporters and editors working this story were forced to make a critical choice in their reporting, which was to decide that what Dann had done and was accused of doing was wrong and deserving of almost daily coverage of the allegations and the calls for him to resign.
This reporting was more than just a sterile journal of the events that occurred. The Dayton Daily News, through strong, passionate, dogged reporting participated in the statewide conversation that brought about Dann’s resignation, which had to happen because what Dann had done was unacceptable conduct for an attorney general.
In short, the Dayton Daily News made a judgment call. The paper’s writers and editors were neither sterile nor neutral, yet they were objective and fair. Their passion and involvement shined a light on something that was wrong in Ohio and helped contribute to righting it.
If only all of Dayton Daily News’ reporting was this successful. If the paper’s writers and editors turned this same attention to the causes of crime or unemployment in Dayton, perhaps such attention could achieve similar results.
My point here is that people cared about the Marc Dann story because papers around Ohio like the Dayton Daily News inspired them to care. In doing so, they engaged in the very spirit of journalism that I believe they should possess every time they report a story. It is because this kind of reporting still exists that I still have hope that journalism can reclaim the spirit I believe it should have.
I do not hate journalism. Instead, I like to believe that I act as the check and balance to journalism as much as it acts as the check and balance to the government. I want journalism to succeed, but it cannot succeed if no one is paying attention to its sterile journal of the day’s events. Make that journal spirited, and journalism will have succeeded and we will all be better for it.
2 comments:
Well put, Dennis. You do a great job of arguing your point to a higher degree than there is time in the classroom. And I'm willing to agree with you that there is a place for social journalism; journalism intent on changing a social aspect, either good or bad. For example, societies who strive for democracy need this kind of critical journalism to keep government honest and doing the job they're hired to do, like the Marc Dann debacle. I also agree that that a news organization, if biased, should plainly state such. But do you think there might be a place for sterility, too? At the root of journalism, like the prehistoric art of cave paintings, the goal is documenting that day in humanity. Journal - literally, a record of the day; ism - literally, act or practice. It's the -ism we get hung up on because it can also mean the philosophy behind journaling.
I've been thinking quite a bit over the past couple of weeks about the "sterile journalism" question, and so far the conclusion that I have come to is that the place for such journalism is in the direct reporting of facts--in 5WH journalism.
As an example, in the Dann case there was plenty of plain old reporting of the facts that really had no reason to be anything other than reporting of the facts. Answering the basic questions of news reporting in the Dann case was "sterile" simply because the answers to those basic questions represented facts that needed little commentary beyond the fact that they existed.
I think, however, that such sterile reporting is a mere facet of journalism. I even hesitate to call it reporting. Chronicling might be an even better word. This is not to say that such chronicling does not have a place in journalism, rather that it represents only one small part of all the things that journalism is supposed to be.
So, in general, journalistic publications should, at a minimum, be chronicles of what has occurred, but just as importantly, they also need to be the source of investigation, context, commentary, and answers as much or more than they are that chronicle. It is the former combined with the latter that defines journalism to me.
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