By Michael Abraham

Opinion has evolved significantly over recent years with the rise of social media and its affinity for proliferating thoughts and creating information silos. In the past, opinion was metaphorically compared to armpits (or another, unflattering body part of the same letter): “everyone has them but they think each other’s stink.” Nowadays, with everyone’s opinions exposed and out in the open, it seems a weaker comparison. If opinions were like armpits in 2020, we would have all suffocated by now. Today, opinions are more like eyes: they get worse over time if left unchecked.

The accessibility and reach of online forums such as Twitter have given rise to fact distortion and the idea of fake news. However, it has also become an invaluable tool for reporters breaking news and following live events. Which raises the question, how is it affecting the news media and way news gets reported?

Few have been in a better position to observe the state of the news media than veteran journalist and news anchor Bret Baier. Baier, who has been a fixture of “Fox News” for over two decades, says that America’s bipartisan system of government has always yielded a broad split of opinion down party lines. Still, the polarization of opinion in America began widening when Donald Trump became president and employed Twitter as his all-in-one virtual middle finger and/or pat on the back. A symptom of this reality, explains Baier, is a change in viewer demands. “Well, I think, you know, some parts of the population go into silos,” he explains. “And they go to hear and see what they want to hear and see.”

To make matters worse, the accessibility of information has made a sizable portion of news consumers lazy, shirking their duty to stay broadly informed and challenge beliefs. The role of devil’s advocate needs an advocate! It’s a sentiment echoed by journalists of all political backgrounds and affiliations. “What you see on Twitter is not always a reality,” stresses Baier. Katy Tur, an experienced journalist in her own right and host of “MSNBC Live”, goes even further, suggesting that, if Twitter were an accurate snapshot of reality, Bernie Sanders would be winning the Democratic presidential nomination by a landslide.

With the explosion of opinion in the media, network news operations have shifted increasingly from hard news programming to news commentary. Commentary doesn’t have to be a bad thing. When coming from an informed and appropriately self-critical voice, it’s an effective tool for contextualizing and analyzing objective news. This issue is that the line between commentary and news has gotten greyer in the eyes of viewers and opinion-peddlers themselves. “I think other networks may have gone over their skis a little bit in doing more opinion, even though they say it’s news,” says Baier. “I mean, CNN has a program that they call news. They say Don Lemon is a newsman. So I don’t know if you watch that show. It sounds like opinion to me.”

Shots fired! On the other hand, ask Baier’s CNN competition and “The Situation Room” would probably echo a similar sentiment about Fox’s own Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. This isn’t to pick on any network in particular. Both consumers and reporters need to recalibrate their objectivity.

Baier, who’s been a journalist since he interned in high school roughly 30 years ago, says opinion and news have always coexisted mostly symbiotically. Before network news, newspapers always had news and opinions pages. The problem is that, more recently, the opinion page is being written with overly emotional ink, which bleeds through, saturating the remaining pages with those opinions and ultimately distorting the news. Trump’s war on the media has only made matters worse. “[Trump] engenders a lot of emotion. Some people in our business who had been non-emotional, impartial arbiters of news got emotional,” Baier says. “And they invested in the emotion of this president and countering this president… and it comes off on the screen.” Analysis is less trustworthy through emotional filters which makes constructive debate, a staple of good political commentary, hard to come by.

The audience, therefore, is much less exposed to reasonable and well articulated challenges of their ideas. Other viewpoints are scoffed at back-and-forth which leaves each side further entrenched in views sometimes ranging from slightly distorted to delusional. Why were people so shocked when Donald Trump was elected president? Why were some convinced he would be removed from office upon impeachment? More recently, bringing back Tur’s mention of Bernie Sanders, why are the Bernie Bros so taken aback by his sudden cooling in the polls? Facts can be ignored if inconvenient and scary realities are diminished when Tucker Carlson or Don Lemon – take your pick – tells you what to think before bed.

Baier, who stresses the distinction between his show and those of his Fox network peers, faces this problem firsthand. Many news consumers completely dismiss him simply because of the network he reports under. “A portion of the population paints with a broad brush, and is not going to give me a shot because I’m on ‘Fox News Channel’,” he says, despite the fact that, “according to Pew Research, [his show] had the most ideologically diverse hour on cable news.” Reporters and consumers alike can take a page from Baier’s book by at least trying to consider opposing perspectives respectfully.

Luckily, there is perhaps some recency bias at play here. As polarized as the national climate currently is, it may not be unprecedented territory. Having written books on various presidents – all across the political ideological spectrum, I should add – Baier is a student of history. He suggests “we’ve gone through very dangerous times in our country,” citing the Vietnam War and counterculture movement, for example.

Hopefully, given time, the news media and citizens of this country will realize we’re on the same team again and productive disagreement can flourish. Hopefully, given time, facts will be facts again.

It’s okay to agree to disagree but it’s both ignorant and arrogant – and if you claim to be a journalist, unethical – to dismiss outright.

By: Jonathan Aguilar

A conversation with Bob Dotson

Retired special correspondent for NBC’s “Today Show” Bob Dotson spends his days teaching journalism to students at Syracuse University, but before that for forty years he told the stories of the American people.

In his long running Emmy winning segment on the Today Show called American Story, Dotson dove deep into the lives of people. He was a master at grabbing audience’s attention and making them care about the subjects in his pieces. For him the most important thing was to get people hooked on the people in his stories.

“Go out and find the details the universal buttons as it were that everybody can relate to. That starts with a strong central character, somebody that they care about,” said Dotson.

Making people care about stories is always difficult but it is especially so when first starting in the industry. For Dotson one of the most liberating things he experienced when he began his career was when another reporter told him that that storytelling is a craft you can learn.

“If you learn the craft even if the other person is more talented as a picture maker or writer or whatever, it doesn’t make a difference because the craft will beat them,” he said.

The art of storytelling is so important to Dotson that he wrote a book about it, “Make It Memorable.” In his book he teaches journalists how to write to the corners of the frame and how not to be redundant.

“Fill in what they can’t see, in other words, you give a little background,” he said.

In his book Dotson mentions a story where he covered the aftermath of a tornado. Most reporters would describe to a viewer the destruction they were seeing. What Dotson did, however, was use his other senses to paint a broader picture. He began the report with, “You could smell the path of the storm before you could see it.”

There are often stories that are reported in the same way over and over. To get away from that as a journalist you need to go down the path others haven’t. While covering an event it is easier to write about what is occurring but to make a compelling story it is important to find an interesting character who people can relate to and become invested in.

“It always starts with a strong central character who is struggling to do something,” he noted.

People want to find something they care about and since in society we are constantly bombarded with large figures and broad details on all the bad that is occurring we have become desensitized. By having a strong character in a story, it allows people to relate to what the character is going through. No longer are you talking about a problem as a whole rather you are talking about a problem on an individual level which makes a story much more interesting.

A reporter’s job is to cover the stories their editors have assigned but what a reporter can also do is find those interesting angles that allow people a new insight. When president John F. Kennedy was killed most reporters were in the press pool at his funeral giving a play by play of what they saw but one great reporter decided to take a different approach. The reporter found the man who dug the grave for the president.

“The man did it on overtime the night before and took no overtime for it because that was his gift to the President,” said Dotson.

Stories like the gravedigger’s get people hooked.  “It’s not that the other stuffs bad, but that’s where everybody else is standing,” Dotson said.

Being a good storyteller isn’t about the gear a reporter has, having lots of money to produce content, or being born with stellar visual communication skills. It is about the details and finding ways to capture people’s attention. There are a lot of reporters covering similar stories, the great ones take different paths.

“Try to make yourself one of a kind,” advised Bob Dotson.  “Now you never will be, but the pursuit of that goal will keep you awake for the next 50 years.”

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By Lacey Latch

Rick Bragg learned how to tell a story on dirt roads in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Born poor in rural Alabama to a hardworking mother and alcoholic father, Bragg began to develop the skills that would eventually separate his career from the rest, as he sat and listened to the Braggs that came before him.

“I grew up with the best storytellers on the planet,” Bragg said. “My uncles on both sides of my family could tell you a story and make you hear the footsteps of a deputy chasing through the dark, you know? They could make you hear the change rattling in their pocket. They just knew that you told a story with drama and detail and color.”

Influenced heavily by his family, the foundation of a well-told story was instilled in Bragg early on.

“Whenever they started to talk, I stopped what I was doing and listened,” he said. “So I didn’t know I wanted to be a journalist. It was just, that was the way that you got paid for telling a story.”

Eventually, Bragg’s career would lead him to tell stories around the globe, covering unrest in Haiti, the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombings and the 1998 Jonesboro, Arkansas school shooting among many other things — all the while infusing each story with the poetry that has become known for. Throughout the process, Bragg became a reporter who could add an extra human element to even the most basic hard news stories. Ultimately, what allowed him to do that was a natural ability to get people to share their experiences with him, helping him to collect a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing along the way.

“Over the years, I did a lot of bad news. I did a lot of storms; I did a coup or two, a lot of killing and dying,” he said. “… Getting people to tell you a story was always the secret.”

Now as an instructor at the University of Alabama, Bragg emphasizes the importance of powerful storytelling to young journalists. Storytelling, he says, is the only real way to get the attention of the everyday person.

Admittedly not an expert on topics like geopolitics at home or abroad, Bragg continues to see powerful storytelling as the greatest tool available to him to make a difference. That sentiment carries through to his current position as a columnist for Southern Living, where he published a powerful column in the days following the race-fueled riots in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2018.

“I think if you write about people that are suffering, vividly, you should not be ashamed of that or feel like they’re being exploited,” he said. “That’s the only way to get anyone to give a damn.”

For those on the outside looking in, it may seem as though Bragg succeeded in spite of the circumstances he was born into but Bragg himself sees it quite the opposite. In fact, decades removed from the nights he spent as a child listening intently to the words spoken before him, Bragg attributes all of his storytelling ability directly to his family and childhood.

“Every story I’ve ever told goes right back to the dirt,” Bragg said. “It doesn’t matter if it was in LA or New York or Miami or the Pakistan-Afghanistan border or in Haiti, they all go right back to the dirt and foothills of the Appalachians.”

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By Bianca Cseke

Sandhya Kambhampati knows a thing or two about data journalism.

As a reporter on the Los Angeles Times’ data desk, she covers everything from elections to demographics and how natural disasters affect tourism in small California towns. When she was with Propublica Illinois, Kambhampati helped with an investigation on the Cook County property tax assessment system, a piece that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

But even though nearly all of Kambhampati’s work uses data and public records to get vital information to the public, she never forgets about the people who her stories impact.

“People are always at stake,” she said. “You always want to go back to the people whose lives and livelihoods are impacted.”

For example, the property tax assessment story Kambhampati worked on started with a tip Jason Grotto, the other Propublica reporter she worked with on the story, received from a real person — not from digging through sets of data on a fishing expedition. The reporters also told the stories of people impacted by property tax assessments favoring pricier commercial buildings at the expense of the owners of cheaper ones.

That included Brenda and Larry Doyle, a couple who own a daycare in Chicago’s West Auburn Gresham neighborhood. Their business’s property value was assessed higher than what they had actually paid for it and that value never went down, while a nearby larger, more expensive building kept getting lower assessments.

When asked what a journalism student who’s about to graduate should know about data reporting, Kambhampati said what reporters from every area of journalism have given as advice: Understand how to write a story and how to conduct an interview.

While it can be useful — even vital — to know how to clean data so it can be understandable for reporters and the general population, once that part of the job is done, even a data reporter needs to be able to think in terms of old-fashioned, basic reporting.

“The way you interview people, you want to interview your data,” Kambhampati said.

That means that when a reporter looks at a set of data, they should ask “the same fundamental questions,” such as why the data says something, who is responsible for it and who it affects, how it came to be and what it is truly saying in the first place.

And no matter how much a data journalist immerses themselves in numbers, they should still remember to always include the people affected by the story.

“Don’t bog the story down with too many numbers,” Kambhampati said.

Other than that, aspiring data journalists should remember to send out records requests early on in the reporting process rather than waiting until later, she said. You never know when officials will put up a fight in getting a reporter the information they need.

Plus, that data can take a lot of work to clean up.

“That’s the thing about data: It might be clean in the heads of the people who put it together, but it might not be for everyone else,” Kambhampati said.

By never forgetting about why most journalists do the work they do — to help people — Sandhya Kambhampati has managed to produce work that has made a difference beyond just the awards her work has garnered or been a finalist for, like when she was part of a team that investigated the German nursing home system. That investigation brought about discussion across Germany about how its nursing homes should be evaluated. By following some of Kambhampati’s advice and working to produce journalism that makes a difference, journalists can help change lives for the better.

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By Sahi Padmanabhan

Fake news, media bias and out-of-touch reporting; with the increasingly divisive political climate shaking up the way we cover politics, ethical debates about covering elections and political bias are more relevant than ever.

Many hard-nosed political reporters don’t vote; some, like Peter Baker of the New York Times have openly said that they don’t vote, don’t belong to non-journalism organizations, don’t belong to political parties and don’t even voice opinions on political issues in private.

For New York Times reporter Astead Herndon, the debate is much more nuanced than just a blanket ban.

“I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule for folks,” Herndon said. “I think that you should do the things that you feel comfortable with and not think that things like voting in a political election makes you less biased, more biased, unless it does.”

It’s a matter of introspection. Without the understanding of what makes one biased personally, it is irrelevant to talk about issues of voting or not voting, he noted.

“I think that the question of voting is small potatoes,” Herndon said. “There’s a more important thing which is about maintaining a journalism that is more than just performatively objective, but fair.”

Herndon has spent much of last year covering the presidential election and will continue to do so until the general election this November. Much of his coverage has discussed black voters, and he hopes to give black voters more well-rounded coverage moving forward.

“I try to take it as, ‘if you’re just writing about the group writ large, you’re probably not showing the necessary nuance between them,” Herndon said. “It shouldn’t be a story about black voters by itself, but generational differences or ideological differences between them.”

Political journalism has always been flawed, Herndon says, and all election coverage has good and bad sides. He says that the only way to provide fair coverage is to actually talk to voters.

“I think that all presidential elections involve good and bad journalism,” Herndon said. “I think that one of the things that we’ve tried to make the priority here is to get out on the road and to make sure that we’re not just embedded with the campaigns themselves, but also (in) the kind of communities which decide our elections.”

One major criticism of political journalism is that it focuses too much on the politicians and not enough on the other stakeholders in our political climate. According to Jonathan Stray in a Medium article, many people who grew up with the internet—people who are now considered a part of the group vaguely termed “young voters”—have become disillusioned with the horse-race style of covering politics, and want to see more of the community and society as a whole reflected in political coverage.

Stray brings up the example of the push for gay marriage, which largely took place in the courts between community activists and stakeholders. Political coverage that focuses entirely on politicians would have missed most, if not all, of that story.

Herndon agrees that political coverage, especially in elections, could benefit from more focus on the people who aren’t in the public eye to better understand the political climate as a whole, rather than just the piecemeal understanding that comes from being a part of a campaign.

“[Reporters should] reflect the kind of diversity of the electorate,” Herndon said. “It has been a real priority for not just dealing with the kind of same constituencies that we’re used to, but making sure that the breadth of, in this primary, the Democratic voters that are electing our representatives. That includes black voters, Latino voters, old and young and kind of the nuance between them.”

This point of view reflects the ever-changing political discourse around voting, voter turnout and issues like voter suppression. Without information from the community, it is difficult to say with any certainty what is actually happening at the ground-level. On top of this, readers are no longer getting their information in the same way they did 20 years ago; and those pathways are constantly shifting and merging.

“I think you have to be comfortable with change,” Herndon said. “I think you have to understand the ways in which people get their information has changed. And you have to understand that voters aren’t necessarily coming from things from the same lens in which you are.”

In the end, Herndon’s coverage is about making sure that he is talking to people on the ground, understanding where they’re coming from and where they’re going, fully immersing himself in a community and reflecting how their getting their information and how they’re using it.

“I should know kind of the different media ecosystems in which Democratic voters are [getting information],” Herndon said. “I should know the regional differences between the communities and try to reflect that. That’s just how the job should be done.”

For Herndon, however, this doesn’t mean fundamentally changing our reporting, just the tools journalists use to cover politics.

“I think that the same tenets of the profession hold true,” Herndon said. “It’s just the tools that you’d have to use to be able to execute [good journalism] change.”

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