Posted on 07/05/2018 11:02:34 AM PDT by Sean_Anthony
Recording history, whether a community event or a gargantuan cataclysm, is a calling. It is ministering to society by relating facts not fantasy
Going from spin to facts, vagueness to specifics and inferences to full quotes. This is part of what it would take to revive journalism.
Simple, right? In reality, hardly possible in a world where journalism schools have mostly been redesignated schools of communications, which is a completely different and oppositional field of study.
Consider what news writing was intended to be—journaling the occurrences of the day. Keeping a public diary, in a manner of speaking, without personal commentary. “Communicating” emotions and responses to occurrences is what it has become.
Journalism is dead.
>>Journalism is dead.<<
Never to return.
As I have note elsewhere, I believe “journalist” is now on par with “politician” and “used car salesman” as the least trusted of all professions.
I am willing to wager there are some data out there to support me but don’t have time to find them now.
A revival might start by taking adjectives out of reportage. That makes manipulation harder. If that isn’t enough, out all verbs, then all nouns if necessary. Easy peasy.
Most of them are not journalists anymore; they’re distortionists.
There are all sorts of subtle ways to manipulate what you write. (I speak as someone who has done some journalism in my time.)
For example, think of how many words you could use for “said.” (Hey, I just wanted a little variation.) But “claimed” carries a different connotation from “declared”, for example. “Asserted” carries a different connotation from “affirmed.” Subtle use of connotative meanings instead of denotative ones. (The most neutral synonym for “said”, if you must have variety, is “stated.”)
So there are all kinds of ways to shade your reporting if you choose to do so.
Yes, there are. I mention verbs and nouns in addition to adjectives. Read an article or paragraph with the adjectives stripped out. Read it again including adjectives. The degree of change you find between the thrust of the article the second reading and the first is the degree to which you are being manipulated by adjective selection. Stripping out the verbs would make for weird reading, though...
Translate the verbs to the most neutral synonym.
And the very first way to "shade" reporting is the decision to report, or not report, in the first place.
I notice watching fictional television there is a mythical journalist in these shows. They always vet their sources, they think twice before reporting on something harmful to national interests, and they check and double check their evidence. LOL. If only journalists truly acted this way.
That’s how they falsely portray themselves. They think they are tricking their audience but most know and recognize the extreme bias.
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