By definition, a journal is an account of day to day events. It is also, more elegantly, a record of experiences, ideas and reflections. One of journalism's most elegant early practitioners, of course, was James Boswell (1740-1795), author of a book I didn't discover until long after I had left journalism myself: The Life of Samuel Johnson.
“It matters not how a man dies," Boswell wrote then, "but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.”
Journalism documents our life and our passing, our trials and triumphs. It's certainly an account of day to events, a record of our shared experience. Journalism is not history--although we often want it to be--but it is a source for historians. Journalism is not literature, although it is sometimes literary in nature. Journalism sometimes fails, but often transcends. Increasingly, in this terrible age, journalism is the means by which we learn, grieve and understand.
Not yet two weeks after the attack in Boston, the criticism and second-guessing is underway. "There were real victims," writes Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, "in the Boston bombings last week — the dead, the wounded, the grieving families, the terrorized communities — but there was substantial collateral damage done to news media credibility."
Mistakes were made, we all know that. Reporter error. Competitive pressure. Combine the terror that we all experienced with the pressures of live television and digital journalism, and perhaps mistakes were inevitable.
That doesn't excuse the mistakes, but it does highlight what can go wrong when the entire world is watching expectantly for not just information, but answers. The pressure for journalists to make a definitive statement--to tell us what we want to know--is immeasurable.
As news practitioners or news consumers, perhaps we can take from this experience this simple knowledge: standing in front of a camera on live television isn't journalism in its grandest sense. It's reportage. True journalism results from investigation and reflection. True journalism is written, not ad-libbed. Perhaps there were many among us who realized the difference last Wednesday evening when Scott Pelley opened the CBS Evening News with the simple statement, "They lost him." As events would quickly demonstrate, "they" found him. But for those of us with a background in news, it was obvious that after an entire day of off-the-cuff reportage, journalists and editors at one of the world's most trusted sources had begun to write about the events we all witnessed. And we all know that it's much easier to make mistakes while ad-libbing instead of writing.
About the author: Ed Lynch, President and Managing Partner of Emergent Communications, is a former reporter for WKYT, Lexington KY.
No comments:
Post a Comment