What Gets Reported

For the last few weeks I've been workig as a feature reporter for the Daily Herald. As I may have mentioned in earlier posts, I'm an intern and I write two articles per week. Because I'm highlighting various arts and cultural events around northern Utah, the stakes are relatively low. However, the experience continues to emphasize to me the incredible power that the press has in determining what information gets out into the public sphere.

For example, I've been writing on some local music events and as I work through the story I have to make countless decisions about what gets included in the story and what gets cut. On virtually every story, a lot more gets left out than what gets included. And though the fact that reporters decide what to include in their stories is fairly common knowledge, I'm not sure everyone knows just how much freedom they have. At least with my stories, I can pretty much write whatever I want as long as it meets basic length, format, and style requirements. That meanst that I can choose to highlight a band's new CD, for example, or on the other hand I could completely disregard their CD (say, if I didn't like it) and chose to focus on something else. I could make the main focus of the article how that band innovates, or I could reverse it and focus on how they're a rip off. In the end, it's really just up to me.

As I mentioned, most people are probably aware that this sort of thing goes on all the time. However, what facinates me even more is the fact that a whole slew of other biases impact my reporting without my even thinking about it. For example, as a result of my playing in bands I tend to want to highlight certain things. In all of my bands I've tried to think very specifically about what kind of experience an audience will have and how to specifically shape that experience. It's one of my personal interests and other musicians don't nessecarily place as much importance on it as I do (and others don't think about it in the same way). Yet whenever I've interviewed musicians (or just performers generally), I always ask a lot of questions about audience. Those people who can answer those questions intelligently come off sounding better. Those who can't either don't sound as good or get left out entirely.

I think this is a really good example of my personal biases shaping my reporting without it being a overt decision. Though I recognize it, it wouldn't occur to me to not ask about audience interaction, even if that's the last thing that matters to a band. (What's more, my interest in audience interaction is probably at least partially influenced by my work as a graduate student and teacher of English, which has nothing to do with the bands I'm interviewing).

Of course, this isn't a big deal for my stories. Some bands sound cooler than others, but ultimately I'm spotlighting them not trying to expose their flaws. However, I think it is illuminative because reporters covering health, politics, crime, war, etc. also have to make these same decisions. Plus, they're also bound by their pre-acquired biases and, whether they recognize that or not (many probably do), there's little they can do to escape it. Again, I know these observations aren't revolutionary, but that doesn't make the power of the press any less amazing.