Public Affairs Reporting Now. News of, by and for the People

382 Pages·2008·4.855 MB·English

by  G. Michael Killenberg (Auth.)

Acquisitions Editors: Cara Anderson and Elinor Actipis
Publishing Services Manager: George Morrison
Project Manager: Kathryn Liston
Assistant Editor: Robin Weston
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Interior Design: Alisa Andreola
Cover Design: Steven Stave
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To Penny
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Preface
Real journalism isn’t a game of trivial pursuit.
Do not be fooled by the daily stream of fluffy stories about fads, fashions or fetishes. People
love to revel in celebrity gossip or fantasize about extreme makeovers. But Donald Trump’s
social life or the South Beach Diet doesn’t satisfy when people worry about a home inva-
sion in their neighborhood or a rezoning proposal to bring a Wal-Mart super center to town
or a Department of Education report that their child’s school scored bottom-most in reading
achievement.
Everyday life, no matter whether the issues or events arise next-door or a continent away,
raises questions and concerns that the public counts on journalists to answer and, more impor-
tant, confront.
Public Affairs Reporting Now: News of, by and for the People is intended to teach the best
practices and provide the best advice for covering what’s generically known as “public affairs
reporting.” It is a term that is neither inspiring nor precise, but “public affairs reporting” has
long described the kind of news coverage that keeps people informed as citizens and keeps our
institutions, public and private, focused on the public good. Journalists, after all, are the ulti-
mate public servants—or should be.
Never underestimate the importance of journalists in a republic such as ours. Those who
hold appointed or elected government positions owe their allegiance to the people, and while
they cannot possibly serve the diverse interests of every citizen, public officials must never
forget who governs in America—the people. Journalists play an indispensable role as surro-
gates for citizens too busy, too tired, too infirm or too unqualified to govern for themselves.
Reporters act on the public’s behalf when they scrutinize candidates for elected office; request
judicial records at the courthouse; investigate the expenditure of municipal tax dollars; attend
meetings of the school board; interview prisoners held in the county jail; or stand watch over a
limitless range of issues and conditions that touch the lives of citizens. As they serve the pub-
lic, journalists expose corruption, sound alarms, question public policy, demand accountability
and expose injustice.
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PREFACE
The subtitle comes, of course, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. News “of the people”
means journalists can never lose their focus on the everyday lives of people. To maintain that
focus, journalists must venture well beyond the institutions and figures of power for news that
can only be found by entering and understanding the world most Americans inhabit. News
“by the people” acknowledges that journalists cannot report the news alone. They depend on
people to share their fears, hopes, aspirations, frustrations and deeply held opinions. People
will not reveal themselves freely unless they sense journalists genuinely care about them. News
“for the people” acknowledges that journalism, at its best and truest, arms citizens with the
knowledge to govern themselves.
About this Book
Public Affairs Reporting Now is an updated and expanded version of a textbook published in
1992. Much has changed in journalism and the news beats that journalists cover, and many of
those changes are identified and examined. Throughout the book, newer information has been
blended with the wisdom of journalism’s elders.
Each chapter provides background and instruction for students in the reporting assignments
they can expect in their first years in journalism. Special areas of reporting, such as politics
and science, receive ample attention, but neither students nor their instructors should expect
the book to provide the depth and sophistication specialized beats require. Journalists gener-
ally must prove themselves ready for specialized beats by years of success at public affairs and
general-assignment reporting.
On one level, the book is a practical, example-laden guide to the traditional beats of pub-
lic affairs useful for both students and working professionals. On another level, it examines
how public affairs reporters go about their work, with attention given to the implications
and consequences of their behavior. As a result, emphasis is placed on multicultural perspec-
tives, interpersonal competence and ethical issues. Students and others who draw from Public
Affairs Reporting Now, however, should view it as a departure point, not a comprehensive set
of instructions. The best reporters never stop learning and discovering new things about them-
selves and others.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Robbie Arkovich for his photographic contributions. Arkovich, a veteran police
officer with a degree in photojournalism, displays his discerning eye for urban life—its ironies,
moods and flavors. In Chapter 7, he adds personal commentary to his photographs. He enriched
the book by his words and images.
My thanks, too, to Kate Bradshaw, my 20-something graduate assistant, who helped me
bridge several generation gaps by critically reading the original textbook. Kate pointed out dated
or unclear references, verified statistical information, recommended contemporary examples
and questioned terminology and idiosyncratic speech if it seemed foreign to her. For each chap-
ter, Kate produced a detailed analysis, complete with recommended changes in both content
and context.
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Preface
Three journalism educators—each an accomplished journalist—reviewed the manuscript and
helped tighten its focus and improve its organization. They helped, as well, by catching errors
of both commission and omission. The three reviewers—Chip Scanlan, Steve Weinberg and Walt
Harrington—embody the highest standards of our profession.
At Elsevier, Amy Jollymore, as acquisitions editor, encouraged me to revive a 15-year-old
book, and she sold the idea to her colleagues. I thank Amy for her confidence in me and her
unwavering support. Cara Anderson took over the project at a crucial juncture, and she patiently
allowed me extra time to finish the manuscript and then quickly put the project on a fast track
for publication. Cara’s able, responsive attention to all the editorial details freed me to focus
on research and writing. Kathryn Liston, project manager, not only kept the book on a strict
production schedule; she gave it special attention, overseeing a front cover and text design
that put a professional sheen on a barebones manuscript. By words and deeds, Amy, Cara and
Kathryn caringly helped me from start to finish. No book could have been in better hands.
Despite all that I owe to these fine people, my greatest inspiration and assistance has come
from three decades of students, through whom I learned valuable lessons in reporting, teaching
and life. Each term, I sent my students into the community, and they returned with extraordi-
nary stories about the community and its people. They helped me understand the community
in its diversity and provided street-level perspectives that influenced how I came to view and
teach journalism.
To me, public affairs reporting comprises the heart and soul of journalism. I hope that all
those who teach and study public affairs reporting experience the great satisfaction that comes
from doing journalism in service to the public.
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1
The Roles and Realities of
Reporting
A protest, a media event—or both? A local group, the Uhurus, marches and chants outside police
headquarters in St. Petersburg, Fla., over the fatal shooting of a young black man by Pinellas County sheriff’s
deputies, who sometimes pursue suspects into the city. Journalists struggle over how—or if—to cover
orchestrated news, dubbed pseudo-events by historian Daniel Boorstin. Because a pseudo-event seems less
“real,” is it therefore less newsworthy? On the other hand, does it reflect an underlying reality that journalists
cannot disregard? (Photograph by Robbie Arkovich.)
On a raw winter night in 1899, an 18-year-old reporter named H. L. Mencken (1880–
1956) struggled to compose what was to be his first published news story—a minor
item from police records. “I wrote and tore up, wrote and tore up,” Mencken later
recounted in Newspaper Days. “Finally there emerged the following:”
A horse, buggy and several sets of harnesses, valued in all at about $250, were stolen
last night from the stable of Howard Quinlan, near Kingsville. The county police are at
work on the case, but so far no trace of either thieves or booty has been found.1
Following a path familiar to generations of journalists, Mencken apprenticed on the
police beat, eventually moving on to other areas of public affairs reporting. He also
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PUBLIC AFFAIRS REPORTING NOW: NEWS OF, BY AND FOR THE PEOPLE
wrote more than 30 books and collections of essays and reported on the American
political scene for nearly a half-century. Despite recent criticism focusing on Mencken’s
anti-Semitic statements, journalists still admire his style and craftsmanship.
Mencken, no doubt, would admire their work, too, recognizing that the world
reporters now cover is vastly more dangerous, complex and ambiguous than the one
he knew. The realities of reporting have changed, and so have the reporter’s roles. In
a few short decades, gang violence displaced stickball on city streets. Silicon Valley
supplanted the factory town. And technicians, wearing protective suits against danger-
ous wastes, took over jobs the garbage collectors once handled. The reporter’s working
knowledge came to include “crack,” anthrax and global warming, as the problems and
the complexities of urban life spilled over into suburban and small-town America.
Today most Americans, seldom by preference, lead an existence characterized
by Big Macs served at the drive-through window instead of leisurely meals enjoyed
around the dining-room table. “Haven’t got time for the pain,” said a popular adver-
tisement, appealing to those so bent on success they could not allow a headache to
slow them down. Life, indeed, rushes on, but who can budget an hour or two for the
week’s grocery shopping, much less fit in a meeting of the school board or the city
council? In an increasingly confusing, troubling world, people depend on journalists
to discover and report news of import in their lives.
While José and Marie Martinez run errands, the school board is debating whether
a 9-year-old carrying the AIDS virus will attend class with 25 other third-graders,
among them the Martinez’s daughter, Mary. Across town, lawyers for a huge waste-
hauling corporation pressure the city council to double the size of its landfill. Beyond
reporting these stories—and stories on water rates, revenue bonds and purse snatch-
ings—journalists are expected to scan the horizon, alert for signs of tomorrow’s
emerging news. It is a challenging, serious calling that requires astute, sensitive and,
above all, responsible practitioners.
A Reporter’s Role
A number of metaphors reflect the traditional role of our news media—“Watchdog,”
“Fourth Estate” and “Checking Power” among them. These terms describe an institu-
tional responsibility to ensure that government performance and policy undergo rigor-
ous scrutiny and critique.
Deeply rooted in our history and law, we can find ample support for the notion
that democracy relies on a free and responsible press. In the 1931 Supreme Court case
of Near v. Minnesota, for example, Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes wrote:
. . .[T]he administration of government has become more complex, the opportunities
for malfeasance and corruption have multiplied, crime has grown to most serious propor-
tions, and the danger of its protection by unfaithful officials and of the impairment of the
fundamental security of life and property by criminal alliances and official neglect, empha-
sizes the primary need of a vigilant and courageous press. . . .
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1 The Roles and Realities of Reporting
In New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 case that gave the press formidable protec-
tion against defamation lawsuits brought by aggrieved public officials, the Supreme
Court said its decision rested upon “a profound national commitment to the principle
that debate on public issues be robust, uninhibited and wide-open.”
Ten years later, Justice Potter Stewart reflected on a free, autonomous, aggressive
press as envisioned by the Founders in drafting our Constitution. “Perhaps our liber-
ties might survive without an independent established press,” he said in an address
at Yale School of Law. “But the Founders doubted it, and, in the year 1974, I think
we can all be thankful for their doubts.” He spoke at the time the nation faced the
Watergate scandal, which was brought to public attention and debate by relentless
investigative journalism.
In our democracy, we depend upon journalists to keep us informed as citizens and
to hold our institutions, both public and private, accountable. Unfortunately the tra-
ditional, civic-rooted role of journalism has suffered as news organizations, at times,
pander to the perceived public appetite for spectacle, sleaze and sensation in search
of audiences other than the Lipitor and Celebrex generation.
Competition alone does not explain journalism’s diminishing role as public servant.
Everyone, it seems, with a talk show plays the game of make-believe journalist. Although
they bring politicians and policymakers on for chats, they provide a safe haven—a civic
duty-free zone—where no one demands accountability and no one challenges or con-
tests what the high-profile guest says or does. So politicians and policymakers inten-
tionally book on Oprah or Maury and bow out to 60 Minutes or the Washington Post.
The Internet, too, has spawned a slew of imposters who operate without allegiance
to codes of ethics and values that guide responsible journalists. Americans—young,
middle–aged and older—find it liberating to access news online, and they frequently
search for news in nontraditional places. Sometimes they make decisions and form
opinions based on the information they acquire online, trusting a Google search more
than the New York Times. With trivial news supplanting serious reporting, and with
all the make-believe, amateur and illegitimate journalists on the scene, real journal-
ists—those who understand they serve the public and buttress democracy—need to
rededicate themselves to the public good. Journalists are the ultimate public servants—
or should be.
A Reporter’s Orientation
Successful journalists understand the value of an interpersonal technique called empa-
thy. Empathy involves a sincere attempt to identify with the experiences and emotions
of others. Practicing empathy does not mean reporters must abandon skepticism or deny
their own feelings. But empathy does require reporters to listen and evaluate with a
open mind, which is not always easy. Consider this situation: Based on hearsay, the
newly assigned courthouse reporter concludes that the county treasurer is a bumpkin
incapable of balancing his own checkbook, much less managing a $15 million budget.
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PUBLIC AFFAIRS REPORTING NOW: NEWS OF, BY AND FOR THE PEOPLE
Now the reporter must interview the treasurer to explore charges by political opponents
that his office is mismanaged. Without a commitment to empathy, will the reporter be
able to give the man a fair hearing? Empathy cannot be feigned or misused as a manip-
ulative interviewing tool, however; it must be genuine and honest.
In the journalist’s world, empathy can coexist with skepticism and assertiveness.
It is often a question of balance and moderation. Communication professor Michael
Schudson offers this advice: “Journalists, like other seekers, must learn to trust them-
selves and their fellows and the world enough to take everything in, while distrusting
themselves and others and the appearances of the world enough not to be taken in by
everything.”2 The words of philosopher Max Ehrmann (1872–1945) also serve as a guide
for journalists:
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the
ignorant; they too have their story. . . . Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the
world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons
strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.3
QUOTABLES
“We must resist the cynical impulse: News organizations must begin to exercise more
self-control over their own darkest habits of thought. . . . There are great benefits to be
found in assuming the worst—often quite cheaply through assuming a posture—and there
are great risks in bringing cynicism under proper journalistic discipline. . . . I don’t sug-
gest that news organizations abandon their role as critics and investigators. Quite the
contrary, they need to expand the areas in which they accept this challenge. But I do
think they need to pause before assuming the worst, hold back when allegations are made
until they develop some credible evidence supporting the charges.” (pp. 192, 193)
—Jack Fuller, News Values, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996
Unfortunately, surveys indicate that the public generally considers journalists as
anything but empathic. They are seen as an arrogant, rude and insensitive lot, inflict-
ing pain wherever they go. Movies and prime-time television programs contribute to
the image by depicting reporters as little better than ruthless news vultures. In 1989,
writer Janet Malcolm began an article in The New Yorker magazine with this blanket
indictment of the press: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself
to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a
kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining
their trust and betraying them without remorse.”4
Malcolm’s description of journalists unfairly and inaccurately generalizes, but her
words deserve to be heard and considered, particularly when she talks about reporter-
source relationships:
The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering like-
ness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes
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1 The Roles and Realities of Reporting
drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him.
On reading the article . . . in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who
seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably
attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with
him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own.5
Stripping away Malcolm’s hyperbole, you will find the root of many reporter-source
problems. Those problems frequently begin with the tendency in reporting to dehu-
manize “news subjects.” Reporters should never treat or view people as objects to
be used and discarded. It might help to remember that a story is not the reporter’s
alone; it belongs, as well, to the people quoted, described and represented in the
story. Reporters must also remember that above all, people—presidents and postmas-
ters alike—want to be treated with decency.
A few journalists, as Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon says, exhibit an “annoy-
ing self-righteousness” that they are “performing a sacred calling.”6 Some adopt a
scorched-earth approach to gathering the news, burning bridges and destroying
resources they might need later on. Some become unnecessarily aggressive, kicking
down doors without first gently knocking. And some confuse skepticism and cyni-
cism, forgetting that one is helpful and the other destructive.
Despite the public’s poor image of reporters, journalists seldom deceive, betray
or exploit deliberately. Nonetheless, even well-intentioned journalists hurt people at
times. Trained, conditioned and rewarded to nail down stories and make deadlines,
they sometimes overlook the feelings and needs of others. Part of that conditioning
includes devotion to a seductive principle: the public’s right to know. It is an ambigu-
ous and, at times, self-serving term. Other than journalists themselves, few people
argue fiercely that the public has a right to know. Besides, which “public” does the
press serve? And if a public’s right to know does exist, who says the public always
wants to know? “The press justifies itself in the name of the public,” said profes-
sor James Carey (1934–2006). “The canons of journalism originate in and flow from
the relationship of the press to the public. The public is totem and talisman, and an
object of ritual homage.”7 Even “objects of ritual homage” do not entitle reporters to
ask anyone anything at any time and at any cost.
Lofty principles of journalism are invoked most passionately on public affairs
beats. Waving the right-to-know banner on high, certain reporters demand answers
and accountability. Indeed, the mythology of journalism casts the press and
public officials in adversarial roles. Should reporters and officials constantly butt
heads? Richard C. Harwood, when he was the Washington Post’s ombudsman, ques-
tioned the value of an adversarial orientation. “[I]t does not contribute to intimate
or confessional relationships in which ‘truthtelling’ . . . is a common transaction.”
Journalists should worry less about becoming too cozy with public officials, he said,
and worry more about becoming too removed. “It is rather the problem of being too
distant from those whose personalities, beliefs, knowledge, hopes and fears are essen-
tial to the understanding we would communicate to our countrymen.”8 Although
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