Since Sept. 11, journalists sometimes have come under fire for what they do best: ask questions and gather information. Some readers seem to be exasperated when reporters challenge those in power.
“At a time when our basic institutions are under threat, and we need accurate, independent information, journalists are told to stop asking questions, stop challenging authority,” Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, recently told an international gathering of news ombudsmen in Salt Lake City. “They are asked to restrain their aggressive monitoring of institutions of power, to curb their skeptical nature.”
In his talk, Kovach focused on whether patriotism and journalism are incompatible. The question: “Are you an American first, or are you a journalist?” is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of journalism in a democratic society, he said.
Kovach said, “A journalist is never more true to democracy never more engaged as a citizen; is never more patriotic than when aggressively doing the job of independently verifying the news of the day; questioning the actions of those in authority; disclosing information the public needs but others wish secret for self-interested purposes.”
He said freedom and democracy do not depend on technology or efficient organization, but “on individuals who refuse to give up the belief that the free flow of information has made freedom and human dignity possible.”
Kovach said that even with all the changes in the way the news is delivered, the primary purpose of journalism remains “to provide citizens with a credible and accurate account of events in society so they can be free and self-governing, so they can make informed decisions.”
Kovach, a journalist for 40 years and once Washington, D.C., bureau chief for The New York Times, told ombudsmen that without the free flow of independent information, which journalism represents in this country, self-government would disappear.
Kovach warned of the dangers of a world polluted with gossip, rumor, speculation and propaganda, a mixture he called “toxic to civic health.
“This is a mixture that will produce a public less and less able to participate in civic life. This is a mixture that makes it more and more likely that a self-appointed elite will be free to exercise its will on society.”
Because market share is such a powerful force in shaping society, he said journalists should “worry about creating a market demand for quality journalism based on citizen first.”
He urged ombudsmen to help create a demand for quality journalism by helping the public “see how the sausage is made to see how journalists work; what informs their decisions; why it is important to the public that journalism works as it does.”
Ombudsmen, he said, should work to clear up the confusion in the public’s mind about the role of journalism. For example, objectivity has “come to be widely understood to mean the opposite of what was intended. Even by journalists,” he said. Along with ombudsmen at other newspapers, I have heard from callers who accuse The San Diego Union-Tribune of bias simply because they disagree with a story.
“When the concept originally evolved, it was not meant to imply that journalists were free of bias, which is the way we often react to the argument. Just the opposite is true. The term began to appear in the 1920s, out of a growing recognition that journalists were not free of bias.”
The original concept involved method, Kovach said. It is the method “the journalist pursues toward journalistic truth that is objective, not the journalist,” Kovach said.
That method involves developing the story by asking questions, seeking multiple sources, writing about additional developments, developing the story layer by layer. Bigger stories might result in opinion columns, editorials, letters to the editor, and even might become the subject of talk shows.
“This practical truth becomes a protean thing, which grows as a stalagmite in a cave, drop by drop over time. And the process by which it grows is transparent to the audience,” Kovach said.
He said journalists should help readers understand the news-gathering process by showing them documentation in a story, by “urging them to ask the most important question they can ask of a story ‘how do they know that?’ And if the answer is not in the story, then it’s not the kind of journalism on which they want to be making the decisions a citizen must make.”
Kovach said it is up to ombudsmen, those of us who are readers representatives, public editors or reader advocates, to see to it that journalists “be as open and honest with audiences as they can about what they know, how they know it and what they don’t,” to reveal as much as possible about sources and methods.
“This transparency that the ombudsman represents signals the journalist’s respect for the audience,” he said.
