| Right around this time in 2022, I was wandering around the University of North Carolina campus finally putting two and two together. I’d been invited to participate in a roundtable about journalism and noticed that the ride from the airport to the university was congested. The Lyft driver said something people being there for the game and I was like, huh, OK. Once I got on campus and started walking around, I realized that “the game” was the NCAA men’s basketball final and that UNC was playing in it. I hadn’t watched college basketball in probably two years at that point. And in passing, I had heard about North Carolina and the NCAA tournament but for some reason assumed it was about NC State? It was UNC, though, and that big game? It was scheduled for Monday evening – the same night of the roundtable. When I met up with the organizers of the event, we had a good laugh. No one had anticipated UNC getting that far in the tournament and now that they were, the campus was buckwild. And we had an event to do in the midst of that. I did have to warn them against listening to the first season of Serial. Have I not mentioned my Serial beef yet? I had been invited to this event partly because of an essay I had written in 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. In his case, one thing that stood out to me as it pertained to journalism was how the police had first written up the incident versus how we all now know how it unfolded. I have a lot of problems with how closely journalists work with the police and how we train reporters to do that from the beginning. But Floyd’s murder brought to mind a story I had worked on in Pittsburgh. Police were chasing a car and pursued all the way into the city’s South Side, which, even at 2 a.m. was teeming with revelers. They caught up with the car and emptied their guns in the middle of a busy street, injuring both passengers and scaring the everloving crap out of everyone pinned in and unable to flee the chaos. I had learned about the story and as I was reporting it out, one of the editors of my newspaper decided to pull it off the front page and edit it into pure nonsense.What I had navigated, along with Floyd’s story, made me think a lot about objectivity. It’s what journalists are meant to strive for. Just the facts. objectivity: lack of favoritism toward one side or another: freedom from bias The problem is that sometimes, our sources are not objective. Sometimes, our sources are very biased indeed because it protects their jobs. You cannot be ever truly objective if you are relying on one source for information. Had George Floyd’s murder been left up to the police narrative, all we would know is that he suffered a medical emergency at the scene of an arrest. I really doubt that in the absence of those eyewitness videos, that a reporter would have gone out to the area and asked folks what they saw that day. When I tried to report a crime story from the other side, I got a lecture about how hard it is to be a cop and a butchered story for my efforts. Despite the NCAA chaos, the journalism roundtable was well-attended, and a success. And unfortunately, UNC did lose. (But the campus did not riot!) One of my fellow panelists, Mackay Coppins, was a nice guy and just published a book about Mitt Romney. The day after the event, I spoke to a class of journalism students about the future of journalism and how there is still space for good, consequential storytelling. We talked about how important it is to get all sides of a story. This might not be the definition of objectivity but seeking out the truth and presenting it should be. You can do that and still not tell people what to think. Below the Fold If you haven’t yet read this story from Esquire magazine about what happened when a local news outlet outed a cross-dressing Alabama pastor, please schedule about one hour in your day, make some coffee and take it in. Usually, mainstream outlets flying in on a small town in the aftermath of tragedy doesn’t go very well, but in this case, honestly, the only place Esquire could go was up. I’ve been thinking a lot about how journalism survives, with small outlets being bought out by people just trying to make money. This story has me thinking about the pitfalls of the upstarts. But I am still digesting this story and the role of local media in an abject tragedy, so I’ll have to circle back. |
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