Posts Tagged ‘reporting’
The Death Toll Continues to Rise
This is a quickie.
At 7 a.m. PST, the West Coast version of CBS This Morning reported on the explosions at a chemical plant in China. They said that 50 people had been killed. At 1 p.m. PST, NPR News reported the death toll at that chemical plant was 50 and climbing. At 7 p.m. PST, NPR News reported again that the death toll was 50.
The later newscast didn’t say the death toll was climbing and it didn’t give a higher number of deaths. In fact, as of the later NPR newscast, the death toll seemed to have remained unchanged throughout the day.
But it is the earlier NPR newscast I am writing about. If a death toll is 50 “and climbing”, how did NPR News know it was climbing? And if it was climbing, shouldn’t the number have been some greater number other than 50?
It is very likely that there are people in extremely critical condition who probably will not survive. But as of the later newscast, they apparently hadn’t yet died and their deaths hadn’t been reflected in updated numbers. So I don’t know why, against available evidence and reporting, NPR News said the number was climbing.
Guts
There are two ways to write a story.
One is to already know what you want to say and then look for quotes or soundbytes that you can drop into the spaces you’ve carved out ahead of time. In essence, you know what you want the story to say and where you want it to go and you don’t really care where it could possibly go on its own. Maybe you do it because you’re pressed for time, or you don’t really care, or because you want to look like something you’re not. Doing a story that way, , you’re kinda sorta censoring. But for sure, you are a lazy SOB who coasts the low road and God help anyone who swallows your crap thinking you’ve done your due diligence. God stop them from making an important choice based on the slop you feed them.
The other way is to start out by knowing nothing. You study the subject, you ask questions from every possible perspective. You talk to people who know what you don’t know and ask them to ask you questions. You ask questions against your own biases, against the information you’re given, with the information you’re given and with your own biases. And once it’s all in one place, on paper, in a hard drive, on a spreadsheet, you start making connections and relationships. You build matrices, and mind maps and block diagrams. And when you know as much as you can know in the time that you’ve had, you start to write. And when you finish writing, you press the button and launch it.
That way of writing a story is harder, slower and full of more dead ends. But, it’s more sincere because it goes where it is supposed to go. You may suffer at the hands of its path, not your own but in the end, you and it end up somewhere much much better than you though every you’d be, sometimes to your own greatest surprise.
Shout Out to Reporters
This isn’t about interviewing, but it is about reporting.
Two things.
First, a reporter may, in his or her career, be a lot of things; spokesperson, marketing expert, advertising consultant, author. But of them all, being a reporter like being a marine, is forever. Especially if being a reporter was first, because the reporter never forgets that the truth is what is really important. To a reporter, the crooked can never be made straight no matter the size of the giant or the paycheck. If someone is trying to make them see something one way, it will never look right to them. It will eat at them because their DNA is lit from within with the power of the pen. Eventually, they’ll start truthtelling because even if the reporter has stopped using his teeth, he never loses them and they resharpen quickly. Semper Fi.
Secondly, I am sick of hearing people who say that a reporter can never be objective so they shouldn’t try. Weak people point to human base nature as an excuse to do nothing. They say that since we can’t be “pure”, any attempt at objectivity is failed and thus, discredited and useless. So reporters should just report with their biases with no attempt to be balanced.
If we’re going to pretend to be civilized, then we should play it out, and that means swallowing the higher ideals hook too. Person A gets away with too much shit while trying to crush Person B for theirs. I’m not for double dealing, but I’m for hypocrisy even less. So, I guess I do care that some get away with it and others don’t simply because some thieves are thicker than others.
In journalism, decent reporters load everything they can find out about questionable someones into the reporter’s centrifuge and whirl the hell out of it until everything has separated, and then burn up what’s left in the reporter’s autoclave until all you’re left with is something that is as pure as you can get. And then you serve it back to the public and wait for what happens. Because in the end, if anything changes, they’ll be the ones to change it.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than nothing, and well above the curve for effort. I’ll take it.