Honest Reporting

by Dennis Green

While it is obvious that honest reporting means you don’t just run the latest press release verbatim, it is perhaps less obvious that simply telling your readers what goes on at a public meeting is also a short cut that short-changes their understanding of the issues at hand. Those meetings are orchestrated, staged, and no one except the occasional maverick ever gets off-script.

So you need to go deeper, and that’s obvious to anyone who has ever dabbled in journalism as I have. At the very least, if you’re doing a story about the Alameda schools, you need to interview Kirsten “Person of Interest in an On-going Investigation” Vital, and ask her a few questions:

1) If State money is being taken away from the schools, where is it going instead?

2) What forces in Sacramento are so powerful that not even the teachers unions have the strength to go up against them?

3) Why don’t you, and the AUSD Trustees, lobby the county and the state for more equity in funding for Alameda schools?

4) Why is there so much money apparently available for re-development and not for education?

5) Is it really easier to go to the local voters and taxpayers for more parcel taxes, new and larger taxes every few years?

6) Are you stacking the election in your favor by doing it by mail and by exempting seniors from paying the tax while allowing them to vote?

Unless you at least pose such deeper questions, you’re merely scooting along the surface of the pond like a June Bug. And your more thoughtful readers will have those questions on their minds and wonder why they don’t apparently occur to you, the thoughtful editor.

The problem with many of the new blogs and “news web sites” is that they are driven by people without any experience as journalists, as true reporters, asking deeper questions, the tougher questions to think of and to answer. Such probing journalism is so rare online that when it happens, word gets around.

Unfortunately, it’s also all too rare these days in print journalism, where corporations have taken over and are driven more by the need to show a profit than to tell the truth. When the threat to cancel advertising, by, say, a restaurant, prevents an editor from running a food reviewer’s critique of the menu, journalistic integrity goes right out the window.

Even some smaller publications suffer this advertising trepidation, but it is almost universal in the corporate journalism mindset. Many readers hungry for deeper coverage of the news, and especially stories that might be somewhat controversial, will remain ravenous. I wish this were not the case, but apparently we’re stuck with the extremes of tepid shallow journalism or the rabid shouting of talk news shows.

©2010 Dennis Green