Reporting is a verb. I wonder whether there is a correlation beaten people who understand how reporting works (if you haven’t spent a day with a beat reporter, you do NOT know) and trust that the press will try to get things right. (Related: reporters are one part of “the media
In conversations with people who are highly skeptical of “the media,” I’ve found that many have an impoverished or Hollywood-style sense of what real reporting entails... from the moment you conceive of a potential story to the moment it is published.
Much of the pushback focuses on the frame a story gets, which is the most performative and least empirical part of the process. But to actually watch a good beat reporter call 30 people a day, and try to puzzle through competing equities and sources’ priors - is a wonder.
Reporting is not: I get a call from a source and I write what she says and it’s published in an hour. It really, really isn’t. That’s glossing or stenography. Reporting is intricate and requires back and forth with multiple sources many times, even for single facts.
Parts of it don’t look pretty, especially out of context, because talking to different people requires different psychological approaches. And - absolutely good reporters (myself way included) take dumb shortcuts at times.
Blindly bashing stories and slants and headlines and stuff is great and part of the enterprise of knocking down the fruits of reporting - 50 years-old project to discredit “the media.” And hell yes - much of the criticism is warranted. But ...
It is very difficult to criticize the process of real reporting, because it is very hard to do, when done well. I wish there was a way for reporters to more conspicuously show their work - not just by describing it - but giving critics a chance to experience it.
I don’t mean for my defense of reporting to serve as a defense of media tribalism, of hoary and antiquated story tropes, of folks who fear being biased more than anything else. Those criticisms hold up, as does _some_ criticism about cultural liberalism.
I mean to say: if you want to defend journalism, start by defending reporting. #ascj. @USCAnnenberg
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.