Reactive Journalism as a Good Thing
I’m an inveterate listener to On the Media, and often find the most interesting parts of the material there to be things said almost in passing. A couple of weeks ago, talking about coverage of hurricane Katrina, weather historian David Laskin told host Bob Garfield that “it’s very difficult to remain fresh and reactive when you’re a reporter of whatever sort. I mean, I think you’re always playing to expectations.”
He has, in a nutshell, talked about a true dilemma of reporting from the field, and reporting in today’s media environment. As a foreign correspondent, I sometimes found myself subject to editors’ expectations of how to frame what I was seeing and hearing, and if I didn’t write to those expectations, the stories could be rejiggered, or rewritten, to conform.
In today’s echo-chamber media environment, that sense of pre-formed expectations — essentially going in with preconceptions, or letting preconceptions shape conceiving, writing and producing of a story — can be especially severe. If, for example, you write to a liberal audience of postitive conservative actions, or vice-versa, you can be drummed out of the room. If you asked conservatives after President Bush had named Harriet E. Miers as a Supreme Court justice whether the president might know what he was doing, you could have been drummed out of the room.
It’s tough — and not just in a hurricane — to be reactive to the storms, and not let the expectations form one’s ideas.