Ryan Jerz :: Reno Blogger

Fun, conversations, and occasional journalism from Reno, Nevada


Misc: My role as a journalist

Near the end of my three week summer session, our class was asked to ponder a question. As journalists, would we rather act as advocates for a position, or would we rather act as referees in a discussion, ensuring all sides are represented equally and fairly? That day, I actually went home and thought about it, but we never discussed it again in class.

A focal point of those three weeks, and certainly gong forward, was John Dewey. Dewey was a philosopher that spent a lot of time trying to figure out why people thought what they did and how to make the public better overall. He thought that the point of democracy was to make you a better person. As a result, Dewey felt like journalists should be advocates for a position. If they were not, they wouldn’t be interesting, and they wouldn’t fully engage their readers. Our program plans to follow that way of thinking by making the public interact with us on our way to, hopeully, solving some issues surrounding the Lake Tahoe environment.

The question remains a very tough one for me. Journalists rely on the public’s emotion to get a reaction to a story. When I wrote of the Pulitzer winner the other day, it was about blogging. But an underlying theme to his talk was that he just wants to get the facts out there. And I’m sure he’s right. He also, despite his resistance to this, is a major advocate for environmental issues. Sure, he goes out there and wants to tell the world what’s happening in a factual manner, and he doesn’t want to advocate any particular position, but by simply deciding that a story is worth spending time on, he’s already become an advocate. Plus, he’s happy that based on his stories, laws have been changed for the better. So while he may not believe he is an advocate, or he may not intend to be an advocate, the fact remains that he’s an advocate.

Where do I fall? Well, I don’t want to be an advocate, either. Right now, I simply don’t know enough to be one. But I have to believe that at some point, I’ll figure out that one or more issues are worth advocating. Whether it’s the way TRPA operates, or it’s the way certain property owners are behaving, or it’s that far too much traffic is allowed, or whatever, I’ll figure it out. But that’s not the whole story.

Since I began writing about things like local politics, my biggest task, as I saw it, was to remain completely fair. While I interjected jokes and opinion in what I wrote, the bottom line was that I spent more time trying to keep everyone in check than I did advocating a position. Because of that, I was accused of either being, or working for, about four different political candidates, all of whom had opposing viewpoints. I started to take pride in that. The sign of a good journalist is to piss off all sides, right? Well, I was getting good practice.

The point I’m trying to make is that I prefer the role of a referee. I love standing in the middle and making sure everyone is being honest with one another. In a game like the political one, somebody has to be making sure that the facts are straight. I’m sure I wasn’t perfect at it, but I tried like nobody else at the time.

To finish this program, each person has to complete a project that brings a new form of journalism to the table. It has to be interactive, it has to level the playing field between the public and the policymakers, and it has to inform. I’m sure there’s more, but I can’t think of anything else. What I’ve found is that my project ideas really have nothing to do with taking any sort of position. Mine are designed to bridge the gap between the public and the policymakers through new ways of spreading knowledge. It’s almost like I’m detached from the emotional trigger that journalists try to hit. Maybe everyone else’s project ideas are the same at this point. I don’t know. I find I’m searching for the ever-elusive “fairness” that lacks in so many policies, and if I can just make it so everyone knows everyone else’s motives, we’ll have taken a step in the right direction.

Can I just be an advocate for fairness?


tags: dewey journalism philosophy democracy tahoe school advocate
posted by Ryan Jerz on 08/23/2006

Comments

The Anon Guy, Aug 23, 04:20 PM #:

There is nothing wrong with objectivity.

People can pick up the Pack Patriot or RNR and read news/opinion slanted a certain way and there is nothing wrong with that as you know it going. But I think there needs to be an objective press, especially in blogs where everything seems to fall on a left or right opinion.

While it may be more enjoyable, maybe even easier, to advocate a specific point of view I’d like to believe people still want to read just the facts and make up their own minds and not be guided. But maybe that’s just naive nowadays.

myrna the minx, Aug 23, 08:10 PM #:

I think the emphasis on ojectivity is what has paralyzed the media in this country today and the blogs have filled the vacum of opinion. A fundamental shift has taken place in which the terms “objectivity” and “facts” have been conflated. They are not the same thing AT ALL.

The free press in this country has a role to play and that role is to be an advocate for the public by investigating stories and providing the facts. Somehow, this has devlolved into reporters reporting what one side says and then what the other side says. There is very little that is factual about this approach. What we need now more than ever are more investigative journalist who truly go after the facts and report them as such. Invaribly, someone or some side will disagree with the facts but it doesn’t change them. Sorry, but I see nothing journalistic about being a referee. Better to become a radio moderator or something if that’s the role you want to play. Referee-ing should not be in the job description of journalists.

Opinion is another story and that’s what editorials, and op-eds, and most bloga are for.

mrjerz, Aug 24, 01:05 AM #:

Anon, it’s a very tough thing to explain, but even reporting the facts tends to lean toward a bias. It’s kind of what I was trying to say: even if you set out to do nothing but report facts, you’re stuck being biased in someone’s eyes. How do you decide what is true and what to leave out, etc.?

Myrna, you’re missing the point of a referee. Maybe I didn’t explain it well (if you can believe that). You don’t sit there and call fouls. What you do is know as much as possible about the subject, and bring all sides to the table, then use your knowledge to make sure everyone is honest. In the end, the most logical (correct) argument is what is adopted. It makes no difference how many people you have on your side. You just need to make the best, most honest case. It’s about building community. If you are an advocate, you fall into a trap of the old model – the loudest, biggest group wins. You’re just a part of one side, not an independent arbiter. That’s how it is today, and that’s not working.

The Anon Guy, Aug 24, 02:18 AM #:

Probably the best compliment a journalist can receive is to be thought of as biased from both sides. That usually means he is doing his job.

The facts are out there and a good journalist will sift through them and try to determine if there is bias or an agenda. If he thinks there is he either leaves it out or puts a disclaimer and let the reader draw their own conclusions.

I don’t think there is a paralysis in today’s media so much as there is one in the public’s ability to decipher it. Why read a story in the newspaper that presents both sides of an argument and make you think when you can just go to a site that already shares your views and bask in the comfort of your own narrow take on an issue.

There are venues for advocacy like books, op-eds and blogs where one knows that it is an opinion. But for honest news one needs to be objective.

Peggasus, Aug 24, 03:39 PM #:

This thing you posit has been bugging me for a long, long time.

Even what we GET to see has been filtered through someone else’s criteria: at some point, someone gets to decide what they do and do not air and report on, and this disturbs me. The nightly network news shows are the best (or worst) examples of this. One of the lead stories last night was about the drop in the housing market (which I, as a person trying to sell a house felt like crying about), but not the war or Iran’s nuclear shit and many other things or other issues of more global and long-reaching importance.

But I know people who only watch Fox because they agree with that point of view, and others who only read and watch media with more traditionally liberal biases, and yet I really don’t know where to go to get all sides of a story without spending hours gathering info from many sources.

And while I generally agree with Anon Guy, I really, sadly, do not believe most people are that interested in trying to make up their own minds. They already have, and they only search out forums that reinforce them, and I find that horrendous.

So yeah, I think being a referree is fine, and especially being an advocate for fairness, so you’ve got your work cut out for you here. Good luck with all that.

Great post, btw.

myrna the minx, Aug 24, 05:01 PM #:

Objectivity in journalism is a crock—-first of all it doesnt and cant really exist, and secondly, its the excuse the MSM has used over the past few years to explain why they have been laying down on the job and giving people a pass. Its why I have to go in search of news from outlets like the BBC and the Christian Science Monitor.

Reporting the facts is not the same thing as being objective—especially in this era of Newspeak. The public relies on the MSM to report the facts, not report the story in a perceived objective manner, and when they don’t (because they risk offedning someone with the truth), we all suffer—journalists and the public alike. The public feels like journalists don’t respect them and the journalists lose respect for the public (see David Brooks). Which comes first is a chicken/egg argument—the build up in lack of respect is fed by both.

David Ryfe, Aug 26, 03:16 PM #:

Hi Ryan and Others. Since I taught this part of Ryan’s class, and I think his comment misses something crucial—not that he got what we were doing wrong, but that not everything is put together—so I thought I should comment. Dewey’s idea is not that journalists become “advocates.” The question “should journalists become advocates” implies that they might be the opposite of advocates, or, in the parlance, objective, or neutral, or “fair.” Dewey’s position is that journalism can never occupy a place outside of political life—can never, for that reason, be objective, neutral, etc. Instead, Dewey would have us think of journalism as useful or not—is it helping the public solve its problems or not? This changes the question entirely—and moves us away from a fairly unproductive conversation about whether or not journalism is biased. In any event, that’s part of what we were doing in this class.

mrjerz, Aug 27, 03:14 PM #:

David, thanks for the comment. I’m not sure which is worse – that I missed something crucial, or that a professor is actually reading this. The point is to have a conversation, though.

I thought we spent a bit of time discussing advocacy in journalism. Were we not making the leap that journalists should be (or at least could not avoid being) advocates in one way or another? And the architect behind that was Dewey. I interpreted it all as since Dewey said it was unavoidable, we should pick a spot and take that position.

It’s actually a bit of a relief that you explain the position as you did. That makes me think we’ll not have to be true advocates. I don’t want to necessarily advocate any position. But I have to say, the word “advocate” was used an awful lot by a lot of people in the class, and from that I inferred that it was going to be that way going forward.

I really appreciate you explaining this better than I could. It was really bothering me.

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