Out of the Closet
*creaking hinges*
“Essential to a free nation is a free, fair and fact-based press.”
--from Stuff Jefferson Once Said, Mostly
In the stories the new boss [, Ron Fournier, new head of The Associated Press’s Washington bureau,] is encouraging, first-person writing and emotive language are okay.
So is scrapping the stonefaced approach to journalism that accepts politicians’ statements at face value and offers equal treatment to all sides of an argument. Instead, reporters are encouraged to throw away the weasel words and call it like they see it when they think public officials have revealed themselves as phonies or flip-floppers.
The new approach was on display in a Liz Sidoti news analysis written earlier this month with the lead, “John McCain calls himself an underdog. That may be an understatement.” ...
...Others warn that what Fournier and other proponents see as truth-telling can easily bleed into opinionizing — exactly the opposite of the AP’s mission of “delivering fast, unbiased news.”
...Fournier cited the article in an essay titled “Accountability Journalism: Liberating reporters and the truth” he wrote for the June 1 issue of the AP’s internal newsletter ...
“It’s AP’s goal this year (and henceforth) to make this accountability journalism a consistent theme in our coverage of public affairs, politics and government. We have unmatched resources and expertise in every state to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make.”
“Katrina was a good example of when the journalism community got it right, because it was staring us in the face,” Fournier, seated in the AP’s Washington bureau, told Politico.
“When George Bush stood up there and said that things were going fine in Katrina, I was able to write, ‘The president is wrong.’ That was pretty liberating. It was also a fact.”
...over recent years, Fournier pushed up against his own boundaries. He left the AP in 2004 to take a Harvard Institute of Politics fellowship that he he said let him look at the journalism world from “five miles off the ground,” rather than “five feet off the ground like you are as a wire reporter.”
...“Washington bureaus are cutting back and newspapers in general are cutting back on their staffs,” said Fournier, who warned that the result would be fewer “really good investigative pieces that stick it to somebody who deserves it” and fewer “sharp, edgy analysis when somebody is breaking their promise, or when they are lying or spinning.”
Since there’s an opening in the marketplace for such reporting, he added, AP reporters have a responsibility not only as journalists and citizens, but also as business people seizing a market opportunity to keep the organization going.
...“There’s a bigger need for this kind of journalism than ever,” he said. “The public is losing faith.” Fournier rattled off a list of institutions, including organized religion, government, media, the military, big business and the courts, in which recent Pew polls show public confidence at all-time lows. “It’s our responsibility,” he said, “to step into that breach and say, ‘Hey, what the hell is going on here?’”
...In Fournier’s view, the average reader is “having a hard time figuring out the right from the wrong, the black from the white” in politics, where gray often prevails.
“But boy, when we can cut through the clutter, and we can say ‘Barack Obama put politics over his word,’ which he did — that’s a fact,” Fournier said. “He did. He may not like the way Liz wrote it, but it is a statement of fact.”
Although I am a but a dumb, frightened clinger, even *I* know that word, “fact” does not mean what you think it means.
“Accountability Journalism: Liberating reporters and the truth”
Obviously a misprint. He really meant “... from the truth”.
Posted by ZZMike on 07/15/08 at 04:34 PM
