With many stories, from climate change to political campaigns to the coronavirus, journalists must rely on expert sources who collect and interpret data and tell the reporters what that data means. Long-developing, ongoing stories – such as the coronavirus today – are particularly difficult for journalists to convey in the day-by-day, article-by-article style which they and the public are used to. Each of these adds to and changes the snowball of truth. It is an ongoing story made up of a series of events, public statements, investigative reports, research findings, political decisions and other facts that emerge all the time. This pandemic is not a one-day story like a press conference or a fire. The question about masks is just one rapidly shifting element among a wide-ranging group of stories whose facts are updated daily, if not hourly. As New York Times opinion writer Charlie Warzel pointed out, the official advice about wearing masks changed completely in the course of a month. The evolving consensus on whether or not to wear masks in public is one example of a part of the coronavirus story that has changed quickly. The changing conclusions journalists can draw from facts about the coronavirus make the weakness inherent in this attitude especially clear, since information is evolving so rapidly. CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off, “And that’s the way it is,” sums up the attitude. Journalists, however, have historically done a bad job of explaining to the public that each day’s news report is, by necessity, incomplete and provisional. The truth is a snowball rolling down a hill, and each new fact changes the snowball, making it bigger and more multifaceted. Kovach and Rosenstiel call truth “a complicated and sometimes contradictory phenomenon.” It emerges as facts collect, and each new fact changes a society’s collective understanding of truth. Journalists tend to cover climate change as a series of events.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |