Feral Beast: Undercover reporters 'fess up on NPR. Weighing Deceit vs a 'bigger truth'

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Undercover reporters 'fess up on NPR. Weighing Deceit vs a 'bigger truth'

Click above to listen to NPR's recent broadcast of clandestine justifications and special pleadings.
Who do you trust? Apologies to Nelly Bly, but in this day and age, this technique resembles a set-up or a stunt rather than real reporting. Think Borat and Bruno. Shudder: not on the level and rather laughable. For many Boomer-era editors, this sort of reportage smacks of Candid Camera, not serious journalism. Fun to do, though. A typica foreign correspondent wheeze is to purchase a girl for sale from, say, a brothel in Nepal or Cambodia, then get her story and set her free. The catch 22 is that you still are paying her pimp/ madam, and it feeds into human trafficking. Hmmmm

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Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.