I had stumbled onto this clip from last Sunday’s John Oliver while eating at Starbucks this morning with my older son.
To grapple with Kovach & Rosenstiel’s ideas about objectivity (and, admittedly, to break up the theoretical with a healthy dose of the satirical), I decided to show it to the class.
While this played, I wrote four passages from Chapter 4 of Elements of Journalism on the board:
“In the original concept… the journalist was not objective, but the journalist’s method could be.”
“Objectivity is not the absence of a point of view.”
“The aim of objectivity [should be] a disciplined unity of method, transparently conveyed.”
The “neutral voice” of traditional journalism, “without a discipline of verification, often is a veneer atop something hollow. Journalists who select sources to reflect their own point of view, and then use the neutral voice to make it seem objective, are engaged in deception.”
Oliver clearly rejects the “neutral voice” — there is no “absence of a point of view” here.
I asked them what Kovach and Rosenstiel might make of Oliver’s methodology and presentation.
Is there room in their vision for this kind of satire? Is his method objective? Is there a “discipline of verification” evident? Are accurate facts “transparently conveyed”?
We talked far longer than I’d expected, but we had time to introduce some more traditional news writing conventions: the inverted pyramid and Asimov’s Dirty Dozen. Their assignment tonight is to reflect on these varied approaches to journalistic writing. What are the merits, the shortcomings, the implications of particular news writing styles? Which conventions do they think they might adopt for their own articles?
I can’t wait to read their ideas. I’ll share them here soon.
For their first blog posts, I asked students to consider how journalists decide what issues and events to cover.
We’ve talked quite a bit about what Kovach and Rosenstiel call the “awareness instinct” – this seemingly instinctual human desire for information. But we can’t be aware of everything — and we don’t appear to seek out an awareness of everything, either. So, what are the mechanisms by which we become aware — and in what ways are we limited? Do certain experiences and stories get marginalized or obscured? How might issues of power, audience, and (of course) the exigencies of the marketplace come into play?
We’re still working as a class to define “journalist,” so students took the question in different directions. Many of them reflected on their own work as student journalists covering issues of importance for their school community.
One student suggested that the apparent objectivity of our news media may perhaps be undercut by both individual preferences and the specificity of one’s lived experience:
If I were a professional journalist, personally I would only write things I know about or are interested in. For example, if you were to give me the task of writing about oil rigs, I would most likely decline because I know it would come out horrific. On the other hand, if you told me to write something on the topic of astronomy, I would without a doubt give a good and well-informed essay on the definition of pulsars.
I think that journalists are human and absolutely do this as well… [snip]
The point of being limited in what you find and what you can be aware of must also be taken into account. Sometimes articles can seem biased because of lack of knowledge or experience on a subject. For example, kids living in Ashburn won’t be able to write the utmost of accuracy when it comes to subjects like Ferguson if they’ve lived here their entire life. –Ilsa, 10th grade
Another student drew on Elements of Journalism to highlight a critical distinction between news writing and other creative work:
In our society, where information is constantly being shared, consumed, and critiqued, it is sometimes worthwhile to examine the ways in which journalists come up with their story ideas. In my experience, the journalistic creative process is slightly different from the standard creative process. After some reflection, I have come to the conclusion that this is because journalists have to take into consideration the large public they’re writing for, and use the best method for interesting/appealing to a wide audience (think of the Theory of the Interlocking Public: citizens have varying degrees of interest in the stories shared by news sources. It is the responsibility of the journalist to market to the widest possible audience.) A second thing that distinguishes a journalist’s restrictions on the way that they produce content is their responsibility to the ten elements, or core principles, of journalism. When a journalist proposes an idea, it is his/her duty to fulfill the concepts of truth/veracity, objectivity (note – in this case, objectivity does not mean lack of bias, but rather a state of transparency and openness) and independence, monitoring of power, and loyalty to the public. –Katie, 8th grade
Katie went on to articulate a series of critical question she asks herself as she sifts fruitful story ideas from unnecessary ones as a student journalist:
Now that we’ve established loose guidelines for the journalistic creative process, we can move to the more focused idea of where they come up with their story ideas. For me personally, the process of devising an idea for an article began with the questions of, “Is this something that I would want to read, but that others would be interested in? Does this article satisfy a lack of knowledge/understanding in a somehow significant area? Can readers act on the information provided in this article (a ‘call to action’), and does this information somehow affect the way they choose to think and act? Is there enough information/potential sources of information to fill several pages with concrete findings? Is this article fun/interesting to the extent that readers will remember my points and arguments?” I found that all of my ideas at least partially came from an area that I felt lacked clarity/information, and most of them were directly involving my immediate community.
We’ll use these questions in class this week as a starting point for building a set of criteria for what the students cover as a staff — essentially, also a grading rubric for their story ideas. I’m excited to find out what they finally decide.