The conscience of the news

by David Benjamin 

 

MADISON, Wis. — My first assignment in journalism, as a college-student stringer for the Rockford (Ill.) Morning Star, was a murder. Alas, it was no mystery. A guy had been killed in a bar fight in Beloit, Wisconsin. The killer was in jail. My editor wanted me to go over to the bar and get a little background on how the fight started, what the bartender and bystanders did or did not do. What happened when the fight spilled into the parking lot and ended in homicide?

Trouble was, when I got to the bar the night after the murder, it was closed, either out of grief, embarrassment or orders from the police chief.

There was no story. If I called the editor to explain, he would understand. But I wasn’t quite ready to give up. This was a section of Beloit with lots of bars. On the off chance that a few witnesses of the murder had switched venues, I entered the next bar down the alley, looked around, took in the ambience, and talked with folks. I even managed a brief, terse exchange with a cautious bartender. Then I went back home to my typewriter and, in newspaper terms, “wrote the scene,” evoking atmospherically a bar crime in a bar where there had been no crime. 

My editor, who knew as well as I that there was no news in my story but needed to fill space in the morning edition, loved it. My little “prose poem” of non-news news got me a steady gig at the the Morning Star. It was also my first journalism class. I got the job not based on my reportorial skills but thanks to a few elements of my personality. I’d been honest about the newslessness of my material, but I compensated with diligence, humility and just enough charm that strangers would talk to me. I also had a boss who saw potential in my instincts. 

Today, qualities like honestly, humility and charm are sorely scarce in a news universe dominated by professional propagandists and social-media amateurs (who give away their ulterior motives by calling themselves “influencers”). But the crackup of the public forum goes hardly noticed by a public who only sporadically follow the quotidian conundrum of human events, or—more typically—despair of the uproar and tune out entirely. 

Critics of journalism have long been viewing with impotent alarm the circus of Goebbelsian grifters on Fox News, OAN and the media’s expanding rings of crapola. At least as alarming to me are the couch-sunk millions who pay no heed to the sturm und drang of the overheating world around them. Not only do they not know the news. They don’t really understand what it is—the difference between news and noise. 

There was a time, I think, that such ordinary folks absorbed and grasped the rhythm and ethics of the news by a sort of osmosis, from radio and then TV, by reading a morning and evening paper every day. I was reading newspapers (mainly the Tomah Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel) by the time I was ten. Twelve years later, I started writing the news. I still do. As I look back, I can identify a few guidelines that keep my conscience relatively clear.

“Consumers” of media don’t think about journalistic standards. Nor should they. In the recent past, people tended—with some reservations—to credit the integrity of the news, because it came either from the editor of the local paper, who lived down the street, or from a cadre of household names who bespoke journalistic probity, like Cronkite at CBS or Bradlee at the Post. When I lived up the street and edited the town’s weekly newspaper, I was surprised, and humbled, by the trust that my readers placed in me and my reporting. 

I told my readers it’s never a good idea to entirely trust what you see in the paper (or Facebook, YouTube, podcast, etc.). But it has become harder for folks to sift actual facts from a daily inundation of non-news, quasi-news, anti-news and outright bullshit. There should be new ways to learn lessons that I absorbed, osmotically, in my daily perusal of the Milwaukee paper. For example,

1) Find your news in an established source known to be impartial and unbiased. Despite the demise of so many newspapers and news organizations, there are still venerable, accessible sources, certainly The New York Times, the news (not editorial) section of The Wall Street Journal, most surviving big-city papers, the shrunken news departments at CBS, NBC and ABC, not to mention CNN and, of course, PBS. These all might seem dull and sexless compared to the current Barbie clone on “Fox and Friends”—but they do not practice to deceive.

1a) By the way, any source that declares itself “impartial and unbiased” is, by definition, partial and biased.

2) Never trust a single source or a report based on one. For example, let’s say NBC cites an item, of “breaking news” from another organization—perhaps Reuters or the Miami Herald. At the moment, this is the only available report. So, the newscaster qualifies the scoop immediately by saying, “This hasn’t been independently corroborated by NBC News.” Real news requires corroboration. Information from a single source, however credible, is incomplete news.

3) Seek attribution. It’s an unfortunate feature of responsible journalism to occasionally depend on anonymous sources—which explains why corroboration is critical to the integrity of the news. Although many witnesses to bar fights and other important events fear reprisals, reporters—this goes double for their editors—grant anonymity reluctantly. The difference between a professional news source and an amateur operation is that very reluctance. Whenever possible, reporters identify sources by name and position. Concealment is the seed of distrust.

4) Seek news from a source with a longstanding reputation for accuracy, and—more important—a consistent record of correcting mistakes. Every day, the Times publishes a half-dozen corrections, often more—simply because you can’t do news without a few typos, omissions, misquotes and oopses along the way. When the Times gets a story terribly wrong (e.g., WMD in Iraq), that rare huge screwup triggers a scandal of national significance, leaving “the newspaper of record,” red-faced and penitent. Heads roll. On the other hand, when Fox News spouts a litany of barefaced whoppers, nary a ripple. It’s dog bites man.

5) You should easily be able to discern, in any medium, a clear division between news and opinion. There’s a caveat, however, to this rule. Good reporters—or their editors—are allowed, even required, to judge the veracity of claims made by prominent figures—politicians particularly—in any given story. Reporting a lie, without immediate challenge, makes the reporter complicit in the lie. By the some token, exposing the lie as it is uttered, is fact, not opinion. Most readers, many reporters and some contemporary editors don’t understand this distinction. 

6) Good reporting lards a fresh story with background information that gives context to new developments. Background illuminates the report, reinforces its facts, and bespeaks the experience of the reporter and the news organization. If every incident has a history, every reporter is a historian.

7) Note the range and length of stories. A good news organization is eclectic, reaching for stories that range from politics to foreign affairs to sports, fashion, cooking, finance and science. Long-form stories indicate depth of research, historical perspective and subject-matter expertise. Good reporters dread major “investigations” because they are arduous and, worse, the reward—getting it all into print—is deferred for months. Reporters are impatient. However, they also relish these assignments, because digging and exposing—finding stuff that nobody knows but they ought to know—is the essence of journalism.

8) If a news source has no presence—either online, in print or on the air—beyond popular social-media platforms, it isn’t news or journalism. It’s amateur hour. It’s gossip, misinformation, disinformation and gross naiveté. It’s horseshit, Sign off.