Reportable facts…
What is a reportable fact?
That question could require a book-length manuscript to answer. For a shorter treatment of journalistic epistemology, you might read my field theory blog essay.
I’ve discussed other answers to this question, for example in this entry about scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s concept of “custodian of fact.”
Let me suggest another reportable fact: the motive of an anonymous source. Here’s what Mark Feldstein has to say in an essay about anonymous sources from the Washington Post:
The problem is that by deliberately omitting the essential explanation of how the source is attempting to manipulate the agenda, the journalist often becomes a virtual accomplice hiding the ongoing but subterranean bureaucratic or ideological conflict at the heart of the story.
This speaks to two issues, one journalists should want to encourage and one they should want to avoid: transparency and stenography.
Reporting the motive of an anonymous source (i.e. a combination of the reason for anonymity and the rhetorical intention behind it) allows readers to understand the information in a fuller context. Further, it gives readers a glimpse inside the process of reporting (what the reporter does) and the process of using reporting as a political tool (what the source does).
Journalism should not abandon the use of anonymous sources. But neither should reporters simply leave reportable facts hidden in their notebooks.
When reporters simply write what they are told, they are no more than stenographers.
re: Reporting the motive of an anonymous source …
This is also true when reporting terrorism or presenting “experts” without context of their background. The difference being that the reporter’s active role in “making” the news is more obvious to the reader when the reporter hides the identity of the source.
I also would like to tie this (superb) essay to a comment at PressThink …
Steve Lovelady:
This resides at the core of journalism’s religion and is the source of much criticism by readers.
I agree that specialized expertise is not needed to report who, what, when and where … but I do not agree that it is unnecessary when reporting why or how.
The result is a structural fallacy masked by journalism’s belief system.
This also exposes the conflict in journalism’s belief system between story-telling without reportorial authority, relying on a cottage industry of outside “experts”, and reportorial suspicion of experts/authority.
Sys- There are several heuristics available to reporters–assuming they learn them–for analyzing motive and/or intention. Kenneth Burke developed dramatism as a technique for explicating motive. My reformulation of the illocutionary act is another.
Argumentum ad verecundiam is a problem precisely because (among other things) reporters too often fail to be custodians of fact and/or fail to report other discernible facts regarding what motives drive the source. And they aren’t very good about explaining their own motives either. I would go so far as to say that a whole bunch of journalists can’t explain their own motives in news gathering/making/producing. As evidence, I offer the odd and vague definitions of news that pervade the j-textbooks and the professional-war-story books by journalists.
re: “reporting terrorism or presenting “experts” without context of their background”
I agree.
This idea of news becoming a conversation instead of a lecture is important here. What effects will/should that metaphor change have on the rhetoric of journalism. At least one change should be a greater need to make the subtext transparent, or, add the meta-narrative specifically.
Today’s links, etc.
Media Research Center: CNN spreading disinformation about Global Warming, making people think it’s real. No doubt those ill-informed men and women on the street have relied on the preponderance of fear-mongering media reports. (That’s the problem with…