WASHINGTON -- Inside journalism, when our critical words are turned against ourselves, we tend to speak with a forked tongue. Forget for a moment that readers find us less than credible. We hardly are credible within our own profession.
We are told, for example, that objectivity and fairness demand that reporters who cover religion should take care not to express personal religious views. I've read articles in professional journals arguing the question, "Can religion reporters be religious?"
Similarly, journalists are told they cannot take a partisan side on political issues. One leading editor at the Washington Post boasts he has not voted in twenty years so he can maintain his political objectivity.
Out of the other side of our mouths, however, we chide ourselves often for not being close enough to what we are covering. The latest example of this, supported recently by nationally syndicated columnist Molly Ivins, suggests journalists do a terrible job of covering the military largely because so few have any military experience.
The implication of Ivins' argument, which also notes that non-veterans hold most current congressional seats, is that one can't cover the military without having experienced military life. Incidentally, by her own logic and despite her political science experience, Ivins thus bars herself from reporting on or commenting on military issues.
This is not a fantasy. I have had several colonels look me in the eye and tell me I can never understand "the life."
Something similar persists in sports journalism. One gets the impression that no one ever wrote a decent baseball story who didn't him- or herself at one time hit a home run. Television sports news has encouraged this attitude by consistently hiring former players and coaches -- many of them inept as journalists -- to explain televised games to viewers.
Where's the truth in these assumptions? Am I alone in my conviction that journalism remains a field open to the "last generalists"?
Must one be a pilot to write about airplanes? Must one build computers to report about them? Does writing about disease demand a medical degree? Must a sports or entertainment reporter skate on a banked track before writing about Roller Jam? Does one have to become a parent to report on childcare? Become a priest to analyze devotion or celibacy? Can one write about the ozone layer or landing on the moon without having been there? Can one criticize a president without having been one?
One attraction of journalism as a career is that one gets to learn constantly and persistently. If an editor sends a reporter to cover a carnival, the reporter must educate him- or herself in the ways of carnivals. If the editor dispatches a reporter to cover a religious cult, that reporter should learn everything possible about the cult.
This, in fact, may be the genius of producing reader-friendly news. A medical writer with a medical degree runs the risk of being more susceptible to losing readers in an avalanche of argot. Similarly, the lawyer who covers the Supreme Court faces a danger of communicating over the heads of readers in legalese. Music critics often rank as the worst offenders of readers who can't carry a tune. We've certainly seen our share of this as technology reporters scurried to explain the Internet to willing but naIve readers.
Most editors would agree it's absurd and counterproductive to demand a reporter be religious before asking him or her to cover a religion story. Why, then, does military experience suddenly become a sine qua non for reporting on our nation's military? Such a demand strikes me as equally absurd.
Newspapers made similar mistakes in the '60s and '70s when editors frequently insisted civil rights issues could only be adequately covered by African-American reporters. The net impact was to communicate that civil rights were uniquely black problems. But as we know, such was not the case, and interestingly, some of the best prize-winning reporting on civil rights came from the pens of non-black journalists.
A renowned psychologist, before he would consent to be interviewed, once asked me how much I knew about psychology. He quickly noted he wasn't trying to be evasive, he wanted to gauge the level at which he would be expected to answer questions. Nevertheless, there was a hint the interview would proceed more smoothly if I had a Ph.D. in psychology.
Not so, I would argue; in fact, an informed but somewhat naive reporter is more likely to ask the kinds of questions that satisfy reader curiosity. This doesn't mean the reporter should be ignorant or lazy (though the profession seems to have engendered such attitudes as a form of creative reporting).
The best reporters get more education with every story they write. Reporting is a path to knowledge. The reporter's skill lies in communicating such learning to the readers.
With Internet skills, journalists have never been in a better position for doing needed research to educate themselves. Sadly, many editors persist in thinking a reporter spending too much time in front of a computer screen is "playing games."
Journalism does such a poor job of reporting on both military and religion issues (and many other issues) because it discourages journalists from educating themselves in these fields, and many editors reinforce the forked-tongue approach. They demand stories from reporters without allowing the reporters adequate time to research a topic. Many small newsrooms will enforce a story quota rather than give writers time to research stories. Professional development often becomes one of the first items dropped from a newsroom budget when cost cutting is enforced.
If many religious leaders had their way, only true believers would report on religious activities. If many military leaders had their way, only graduates of the service academies or Officers Candidate School would determine what gets reported about activities of the military. A reporter steeped in these topics though not necessarily experienced or specially trained has deeper affinities with the larger reading audience.
We in journalism, remembering that our freedom is only as good as the freedom of our least sophisticated citizen-reader, should resist such experience-elitist attitudes. At the same time we must insist our reporters be people with a built-in compulsion to educate themselves in as broad a range of knowledge as possible and to pass that education along to readers.
Copyright 1999 Joe
Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.
Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net
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