Card: A Bedford/St.
Martin’s Production
Card: Clarence Page,
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist
0:00:05.5
Clarence Page
One of the most
surprising developments of this new media age is to me is how it has produced
uh.. a new generation of youngsters coming into either journalism schools, or
the business, who want to just right away start writing opinion, uh.. who don’t
know that journalism <laughs> is supposed to be, at least in American
tradition, uh.. is supposed to be primarily uh.. objective reporting. Uh.. and
uh.. the providing of facts, uh.. “just the facts,” as we used to say back in
my day.
Card: The Contemporary
Journalist: Pundit or Reporter?
Card: Richard Campbell,
Author and Journalism Professor
0:00:36.5
Richard Campbell
I think there’s a
lot of confusion about kind of opinion-based journalism, or punditry, and
actual uh.. reporting. And some of this is self-inflicted. I mean, we have —
you have l — on cable television, you have a lot of people who in their day job
they’re reporters, and then on the weekends or in the evenings, they’re asked
to serve as pundits and comment on their- their reporting often.
0:01:02.2
Clarence Page
Uh.. but today,
because of uh.. of the internet and blogging becoming popular, talk radio,
etcetera, I think youngsters see uh.. the big stars of the media expressing
their opinion all the time, and think that that’s what reporting is about. And
we have to disabuse them of that notion right away. ’Cause it’s really all
about reporting. That’s really the foundation — and I don’t care whether you’re
on a newspaper, TV, radio, or the web, uh.. what the public wants is that
information first of all. Then you can give them an- an opinion to bounce their
opinion off of, but reporting is basic.
0:01:36.3
Richard Campbell
And so we’ve often
sort of kept this line between, again, I think a useful way to talk about this
is the kind of a news or journalism of- of verification, in which the
reporter’s job is to sort of document what’s going on in the world, and
providing evidence for that, and talking to people who sort of know something
about it versus uh.. journalism of assertion, in which you have lots of talking
heads about strong opinions, but often d- don’t document uh.. what they do.
0:02:06.8
Clarence Page
I think uhm.. the
explosion of- of new media has made it harder and harder uh.. for you to have
a- a little think time, uh.. with- with all that media turned off, and just
meditate a little bit. Uh.. and that’s the pundit’s prerogative, if you will,
that we don’t take advantage of enough. Uh.. too often we think reflexively.
Usually according to whether I come from the political right or the political
left, or the social right or left. Uh.. and thus we have a pre-programmed
’s
0:02:36.6
boring. Uh.. I think it’s much better to be unpredictable.
Uh.. sometimes you can s- you can sur- surprise yourself when you kick back and
start thinking about uh.. these things, and- and get past the preconceived
notions. And to me, that’s what journalism is really supposed to be about is
just answering that curiosity, just following that curiosity out there. Not
only to find out what is there out there in the world that you don’t know, you
0:03:00.7
want to tell your audience about, but what’s going on in
your own head, that you’ve really taken that much time to explore?
Card: Producers: Peter Berkow & Michael Hoopingarner
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