The job of a reporter
Mark has a very interesting post about the current attitude of the media. Are they trying to make news, or just reporting it? It's an important question.
A highlight from Mark's post:
Blitzer then gives the punchline: "That's my job. I'm a newsman. That's what I try to do, is make news. And you try to avoid news. That's your job."
I did not realize that the job of a newsman was to "make" news. I always thought their job was to report the news that already existed.
What do you think? Do you think some reporters and news organizations (not all, obviously, but perhaps a significant number?) try to create news rather than just reporting it?
A highlight from Mark's post:
Blitzer then gives the punchline: "That's my job. I'm a newsman. That's what I try to do, is make news. And you try to avoid news. That's your job."
I did not realize that the job of a newsman was to "make" news. I always thought their job was to report the news that already existed.
What do you think? Do you think some reporters and news organizations (not all, obviously, but perhaps a significant number?) try to create news rather than just reporting it?
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Posted by purple_kangaroo at 1:04 AM[Permanent link]
6 Comments:
I would say that since the Gulf War and the rising popularity of CNN and their cable ilk (and the unfortunate inception of Fox News) that there has been a huge shift in the news.
Instead of waiting for the facts and letting them unfold into a story (and being forced to wait on newspaper deadlines), people in the media have become closer to paparazzi and just train their cameras onto anything that moves and start reporting, facts or not.
If you wait 24 hours to watch the news after something happens, you come sort of close to the news and the story. But when you watch the initial stuff, there is a lot of speculation by the media, and not a lot of substance. The good thing about the new way of doing things is you get to see things fast and as they happen. The negative is that a lot of "facts" in the stories end up getting reversed later.
So I guess that is my long-winded way of saying that news is being made a lot now.
I think some reporters may be fabricating news, but at least where I worked (at a newspaper before my daughter was born), it seemed like news was reported, not created.
What's sad to me is that so much of our news is negative. Where are the good things happening in the world? Not worth reporting?
I've heard that in Canada, the majority of their news is positive - completely the opposite of ours.
I think that more and more we see speculation based on minimal facts. I think this is because we now have news 24 hours a day. What would they report about if they only stuck to the concrete known facts?
maybe they're trying to make the news appear more interesting or more newsworthy? (which is shady, but maybe that's what he meant?)
It seems like at some point there's a fine line. Digging up a story and finding the facts and the way to communicate it in a gripping way is a valid part of some types of reporting. Even deciding what angle to take on a story and connecting the dots to some extent can be a part of, for instance, a human interest story.
But when it comes to reporting the facts about something, IMHO reporters should stick to just that--reporting the facts. In a place where we trust the news to be accurate, there is no place for speculation or embelleshing of any kind.
I think it's true, though, that 24-hour news and news as entertainment has changed the face of the news, and not always in a good way.
It was actually the first thing I thought of when they started telling people to evacuate La, that they were just trying to make news. It comes from this frustration in the Northeast with the exaggerated way every storm is reported. You would think that every weekend we are facing the end of the world!
It is unfortunate, because then when something really is news I think we are desensitized.
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