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Rewriting history: Anniversary stories, shared memory and minority voices

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by Meagan Doll & Steven Wang, CJE fellows

“What is often a winner is a story that the audience largely finds familiar with perhaps a palatable twist in it,” Mascall-Dare said. “What I found is that if I go into a story with a framing strategy that my audience finds very comforting and that basically fits the grand narrative, and then I smuggle in the new, interesting, controversial, challenging stuff, they can better go along with it.”

Events like this week’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day bring a predictable onslaught of anniversary and remembrance stories.

The events of the past are memorialized, recreated and retold in the age-old practice of the anniversary story.

“Though the stories are about the past, we are building memories for the future generations,” said Carolyn Kitch, a journalism professor at Temple University.

But, there’s an ethical problem with accepting the truth that’s been told before as the only version of the truth.

Re-purposing the same narrative year after year can reinforce the marginalization of previously unheard voices, said Gregory Favre, a former executive editor of the Sacramento Bee and vice president for McClatchy Newspapers.

Journalists have ethical responsibilities to both their audiences and people who lived the events to dig deeper, Kitch said.

Today, journalists and scholars need to do more to analyze how anniversary news stories can perpetuate stereotypes, said independent journalist and media ethics scholar Sharon Mascall-Dare.

“When we’re thinking about journalism in the context of racialized anniversary stories where journalists have to interrogate narratives and think carefully about how stories are told and the shaping of collective memory and the ethical responsibility that goes with telling that story well and accurately.”

WHOSE HISTORY?

For those who believe journalism to be a first draft of history, anniversary stories provide a second (or 100th) opportunity to explore, amend and reinforce collective memory associated with high-profile events.

Stephen Ward, a media ethicist now based in Madison, Wisconsin, said it is difficult for journalists to construct an accurate memory.

But, particularly when these anniversary stories have an element of race, the collective memory may not be accurate. Ward said reporters and audiences default to subtle biases that are particularly problematic when the coverage is about minority groups.

“We accept certain narratives,” Ward said. History as told in news coverage tends to reinforce the established mainstream view, or a white man view regarding stories including racial minorities.

Anniversary reporting amplifies a certain social memory because journalists  spread one version of the events to those who aren’t eyewitnesses, she said.

“Social memory is about the public constructing shared meanings,” Kitch said.

Journalists should also be sensitive to ideologies embedded in stories commemorating historical events, Ward added. Anniversary reporting of events like Sept. 11 attacks and D-Day can easily take on a patriotic perspective.

For example, anniversary coverage of Sept. 11 generally emphasizes patriots and heroic events, while downplaying the ethic discrimination toward “the enemies,” Ward said.

WHOSE STORY?

Favre, who in addition to working for the Bee and McClatchy wrote about remembering  Hurricane Katrina for Poynter, said said anniversary stories play a part in preventing similar tragedies to those which are often commemorated.

“The function of anniversary stories is to rekindle memories, of course” he said. “But it is also to make sure people don’t forget – if things can be prevented in the future, perhaps this is another step to prevention.”

But even the decision about which stories to retell is made without marginalized voices in mind.

Mascall-Dare, who is based Adelaide, South Australia, said there has been a historic focus on reader figures, influencing whose stories are magnified.

Editors and journalists choose to commemorate with news coverage the stories and events they think will attract the largest audience.

“Often, reader figures, click figures, listener figures come first,” she said.

Mascall-Dare said the consequence of this reality is that the stories of racial minorities often go unheard.

She points to a national day of remembrance for military veterans in Australia and New Zealand as an example. The day was originally created to specifically honor the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought at Gallipoli against the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

“The Anzac story has essentially become a national defining narrative,” Mascall-Dare said. “And race comes into that narrative because [ANZAC Day] tends to be dominated very much by a narrative that privileges an image of the iconic anglo-saxon Australian soldier, to the exclusion of indigenous soldiers and other migrant nationalities.”

While Mascall-Dare’s research challenges racial inequities present in some anniversary stories, she also warned that journalists must proceed with caution when writing about pre-conceived racialized stories.

Journalism, which counts conflict among its central news values, will often highlight the controversy of racial diversity as a storytelling technique, Mascall-Dare said. Reporters can tell more accurate stories by listening to sources rather than inserting their own narrative, she said.

“It’s important when engaging with people in a cross-cultural context that we allow the people we’re engaging with to set their own terms about what they do or don’t think is appropriate and to decide whether the subject matter is even race related,” she said. “Sometimes a story that may have a race connection may turn out that race is not even the crux of it.”

WHAT ANGLE?

Embed from Getty Images

When journalists set out to report an anniversary story, they often begin by returning to the breaking news published at the time of the event, said Kitch. Kitch, who is also chairwoman of Journalism and Mass Communication at Temple’s School of Media and Communication, has long focused her research on journalism history and public memory.

“Try to put a fresh face on stories,” Favre said. “The problem is some people just recycle the same old, same old and that doesn’t advance those stories or look at them in a different way.”

Bringing in minority voices is a delicate balance, Mascall-Dare said, admitting that the odds may feel against those trying to challenge the dominant narrative.

“You’ve got to be very strategic about how you go about it as a communicator,” she added.

Favre said he tries to make anniversary stories into contemporary reflections.

“I always like to look forward. Where are we now? What has taken place to make sure the levees won’t break again in New Orleans?” he said. “Looking back doesn’t always serve your reader well.”

Ward said a self-indulgent sentiment is the first thing to avoid. The interpretation of past events should have a critical emphasis on their social impacts, he said.

The focus should be about  how audiences can understand the present problems better by looking back at them. Mascall-Dare had similar advice for journalists: Adopt a challenging perspective within a largely familiar story.

What is often a winner is a story that the audience largely finds familiar with perhaps a palatable twist in it,” she said. “What I found is that if I go into a story with a framing strategy that my audience finds very comforting and that basically fits the grand narrative, and then I smuggle in the new, interesting, controversial, challenging stuff, they can better go along with it.”

 

WHAT NEXT?

Mascall-Dare said anniversary stories can add depth to simplistic grand views of history.

“The  beauty is that by exploring other perspectives which might be seen as alternative or irrelevant or confusing, surely that’s where you can add to the richness of understanding around that event,” she said. “You can aspire to a far more inclusive and socially and ethically responsible representation when you’re not privileging some voices over others or marginalizing particular perspectives.”

Journalism_and_Media_at_Griffith_College

Moving toward these goals, Mascall-Dare encouraged journalists to do their part to teach and not simply entertain.

“I would argue that this is where journalists need to think about their role as not just feeding a hungry animal,” she said. “In order to challenge audience perspectives and bring them onside with new and alternatives ways of thinking about that narrative, you do need to be prepared to step into that role of an educator.”

Favre encouraged journalists to do more than rehash the past.

This can involve telling people “what they don’t necessarily want to hear,” Favre said, suggesting that journalist can become too dependent on entertainment value and audience statistics.

Kitch said journalists should lead public attention to work still needed to be done and provide the political and economic context for racial inequality.

Ward suggested a more-diverse newsroom as solution to combat racial inequities especially.

“You need people who really understand the culture,” he said. “You’ve got to take time and effort to know those people, without taking out your threatening notepads at first.”

Mascall-Dare added that change can begin with one’s own moral conscience, encouraging journalists to call out unethical reporting in the newsroom.

“For any young journalist in the profession today, that’s what they need to be aspiring to – brave, courageous, outspoken, challenging, confronting journalism,” she said. “If we’ve gone into the job for the right reason, you should have no qualms about standing up and calling out cliche or unethical reporting when you see it. At the end as journalists, isn’t that what we’re all meant to do?”

This story is one in an occasional series about Race, Ethnicity and Journalism Ethics. These stories will culminate in the center’s annual conference April 29.

Making 2016 the Year of Engaged Media Ethics

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Last year was one of challenging questions for media in the airing of graphic video: from Fox News’ decision to air a brutal video of a pilot being burned alive by ISIS to a 60 Minutes package on the aftermath of a sarin gas attack to dash-cam footage of the shooting of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police. Reporters, producers, editors and news directors time and again faced difficult decisions about what to show, when to show it and how to label it.

But one video in particular stood out to me. In November, KUSA in Denver ran a package on the fiery crash of a Flight for Life helicopter. I was struck by the vividness of the story, the depth of the reporting and the intensity of the fire. But I was even more struck by how carefully the station and its staff explained their decisions to show parts of the video and withhold others. They took the public and the issues seriously, something we don’t see in news today as much as we should.

News organizations have a clear choice to make on ethics as we head into a new year. For too long, we have treated our decision-making as something that is rightly left only to us. Too often, we put up walls between ourselves and our communities, preferring the protection of professionalism to the discomfort of having our decisions challenged. I would argue the time has long since come to change that orientation. We need to move away from our closed systems and find new ways to collaborate with our communities. We need an engaged ethics in journalism.

An apparent culture of vultures

A month before KUSA’s admirable approach, news media faced scrutiny in the aftermath of the shootings at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. As the scene was still active and people on campus tweeted about what they were seeing, reporters and producers started tweeting at them, prompting critics to question the underlying ethics, using terms like “vampire journalism” and “wolves at the gate.”

While some, including Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky, defended the reporting, the case made clear that certain practices in journalism may make sense in the newsroom but are rejected by those outside it. Claims of newsworthiness — the defense inside journalism circles — are viewed more skeptically by many citizens.

The apparent value of information led a number of outlets to send reporters and cameras barreling into the apartment of the suspects in the deadly shootings in San Bernardino last month. The crews were there legally, as the landlord willing gave them access to his property, but the frenzy drew quick and withering critique.

 

A moment for introspection

Journalism faces a key moment. In addition to cases like these, where behavior in breaking situations is called into question, overall trust in news media is at a historic low. We also see eroding understanding of and support for First Amendment freedoms and failure to build relationships with varying communities, as was apparent at the University of Missouri, where protesters and even a communications professor blocked reporters’ access.

Yet it’s critical to remember that some of the work journalists are doing today is unprecedented in quality, depth and ethical reasoning. For instance, we started out 2015 questioning ethics after Rolling Stone’s retraction of its explosive campus rape story. But we ended it with ProPublica’s stunning investigation and its “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” — must-read journalism if I’ve ever seen it.

So the question becomes how can we continue to report bravely on often-difficult issues of public concern without falling victim to the failings of pack journalism, privacy invasions and needless harms. One way to accomplish that is to engage with our public on the ethics concerns that vex us.

Ways forward

What would an engaged ethics look like? In part, exactly as KUSA’s helicopter story looked. News workers consider the impact and potential for harm posed by their stories all the time. Why not cover those concerns in our stories? When we illuminate the difficult decisions behind reporting, the audience is better able to understand the processes and ethics of journalism.

But engagement doesn’t mean merely telling people why we do what we do. We have to aim additionally for meaningful ways to involve the public. This might include some specific steps.

Return of the reader representative. The decline of news ombudsmen — or public editors — over the last decade unfortunately came at the precise moment people had means to be more involved with news. Giving audiences a person on the inside with whom to connect on questions of quality and ethics engages a mobilized community, yet the U.S. has about half as many ombuds as we did in 2000 (a trend, by the way, that’s the reverse of gains in Europe, Asia and South America).

Margaret Sullivan’s smart work as Public Editor of the New York Times is an important example. The Times established the public editor role in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal. One of the disturbing insights that arose from the Blair investigation was that sources had known Blair was fabricating information but never informed anyone at the Times. They assumed this was business as usual for news media. Roles like Sullivan’s establish a clear pathway for readers and a visible sign that the organization cares about its standards.

Getting beyond the trolls. When I do research with news workers on how they might involve the public and why they often don’t, the complaint I hear most frequently focuses on those who pollute online commenting platforms and social media accounts with personal attacks, misinformation and partisanship.  Yet comments and posts can raise valid concerns about coverage choices.

The Guardian’s audience, for instance, used commenting to highlight problematic imagery the outlet used as art on stories about anxiety, depression and mental health. If we’re going to use the technological affordances of the digital age to engage with our communities, we have got to put priority on how we make commenting platforms work.

Bringing the public in. It’s also time to forget the technology and get back to good, old-fashioned conversation. My work on ethics and emerging practices in journalism had led me to conduct focus groups with citizens, and my eyes have been opened by how they challenge some traditional assumptions and question the value of certain reporting. These kinds of sessions would be cheap, easy and incredibly valuable for more news organizations to engage in. This is not to say we automatically change our coverage because “the focus group said so.” But we can glean important insights and learn how to respond to the public’s lack of trust.

Boston public radio station WBUR did this in 2013, when it hosted a public forum following the Boston Marathon bombings. Civic leaders were part of a broad-based conversation, and the attendees had the chance to engage in the discussion, including asking questions of the Boston Globe about its coverage.

Engagement is a buzzword zinging around many newsrooms today, often in pursuit of audience. While it’s important to connect and collaborate with people who consume our news, it’s equally important to engage them in processes and ethics of how we create it.

This post originally appeared on MediaShift, where Culver serves as an education curator. It is republished here with permission.

A Different Lens on Race, Media and Ethics

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I never thought I would write this: I was troubled by something, and Donald Trump helped me figure it out.

Coming off the recent confrontation between protesters and journalists at the University of Missouri, I felt unsettled. My social media feeds — loaded with journalists, educators and students — almost immediately dissolved into a binary. Many in my circles decried attempts to deprive reporters of their rights to be doing their jobs in a public space. You were either for the free press rights of journalists or you were against. I couldn’t even raise questions about the protesters’ perspectives in comments without being derided for not giving the First Amendment a full-throated defense.

Kathleen Culver

Kathleen Culver

So here it is: of course journalists have a right to report in public spaces if people don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The prof was wrong, and yes, it was particularly regrettable on a campus housing one of the world’s most noted journalism schools.

But as I told my students in discussions of the controversy, if we’re going to move forward on race, we need to do better than a binary. We need to take a serious look at the protesters’ lack of trust in news reporters and concerns about having their narratives misconstrued by media that all too often get race wrong. And we ought to think about how locking media out of movements has power to perpetuate and expand the wrongs we’re already not righting.

Yet I was still troubled.

Enter: The Donald.

When the GOP candidate recently said of a black protester at one of his campaign events “maybe he should have been roughed up,” it called to my mind Trump’s security earlier removing Univision reporter Jorge Ramos from a press conference. My concern then crystallized for me. News media and citizen protesters both deeply need their rights to free expression and assembly when taking on powerful forces like Trump, who have tapped into racial discord for political advantage. Yet Mizzou demonstrated that many do not see the union in that struggle. Both sides seemed irreparably wedded — to quote Nat Hentoff — to “free speech for me, but not for thee.”

Screenshot of CNN interview with Jorge Ramos.

The struggle is shared

The thin understanding of the First Amendment among media friends and colleagues in the wake of Mizzou stunned me. First and foremost, they equated freedom of “the press” with freedom of “established news media.” But a look at free expression case law in the 20th Century (there’s almost none before that) shows a U.S. Supreme Court skeptical of that reading. The amendment’s ban on “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” refers not to press as institution, but as instrument, scholars argue. It does not cover individual speakers via “speech” and news media via “the press.” It covers spoken and written expression.

It’s critical to remember that the Bill of Rights, including the speech and press clauses of the First Amendment, are individual rights, not institutional ones. And the fight for those rights has been long, convoluted and often tightly tied to social upheavals of the time. It should be lost on no one that one of the nation’s most important cases upholding freedom of the press was actually a civil rights case.

In 1964, the Supreme Court held in New York Times v. Sullivan that public officials had to prove what is known as “actual malice” when bringing libel suits related to their official conduct. The particulars of that standard are not important here. What’s key is that the decision made it far more difficult for public officials to win libel cases.

Leaders of the March on Washington pose at the Lincoln Memorial , Aug. 28, 1963. (Photo courtesy of the Archives Foundation and used here under Creative Commons license.)

How is this related to civil rights and the struggle for racial equality? In the case, Sullivan and others had sued the Times over an ad titled “Heed Their Rising Voices,” which sought to raise funds to help defend Martin Luther King Jr. Libel litigation had been an incredibly effective weapon for Southern officials trying to intimidate journalists, and the national media in particular, from reporting on the civil rights movement. At the time the Sullivan case was decided, news media faced hundreds of millions of dollars in libel judgments in cases brought by politicians and authorities to silence coverage critical of their behavior.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Sullivan overturned these outstanding judgments, finding that public officials can successfully sue for false statements that damage their reputation only when they can show the publisher knew those statements were false or had reckless disregard for the truth. This standard is tremendously protective and liberated national media in reporting on civil rights and racial prejudice in the South.

Learning lessons

This history lesson is important for both journalists — including all the pals in my social media feeds — and protesters to bear in mind. Let’s start with those student protesters on the quad at Mizzou. I understand the lack of trust. Decades (centuries, actually) of flawed and biased reporting, intractable stereotyping and newsrooms that are anything but racially and socioeconomically diverse. These are the things that rightfully prompt these students of color to see established news media as yet another institution that furthers white power and squelches progress on race.

King and his fellow civil rights leaders might have felt the same way. After all, where was the New York Times during what Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative justifiably called the “racial terrorism of lynching” throughout the South after the collapse of reconstruction? Where were local newspapers fighting back against poll taxes, literacy tests and other attempts to deny voter rights? The answer: Nowhere to be found.

reflections

Yet no matter how flawed or how late these news media were, civil rights leaders recognized them as an essential tool in the struggle. It made strategic sense to stay open and connected, regardless of prior and current poor treatment. And indeed, I cannot imagine the historic resignation of top University of Missouri administrators without the pressure brought by international media coverage of the protests and statements by the school’s football team.

Protests have emerged at campuses nationwide. (Photo by Max Goldberg on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.)

An alum recently asked me how in the world student protesters at Yale and Princeton could reject the Bill of Rights as inventions by white men to preserve their own power. I answered, “Two words: Jim Crow.” In the U.S., we have never come to terms with the legacies of legalized segregation and the lasting effects of suppressing the rights of some citizens based on their race. The protesters’ viewpoints are easily apparent to me even though, as a white woman, I have never lived their reality. Yet it was national media coverage of their protests that informed me last week that President Woodrow Wilson was responsible for a disastrous resegregation of federal employees. I’d certainly never learned that before.

In the main, preserving access for news media will further these students’ causes, even when coverage overall can rightfully be attacked.

Rights and responsibilities

But most of the media-focused commenters in my feeds would have it stop there. It is up to the protestors to understand that we have a right to be there and it’s ultimately in their own interests. It’s up to citizens to appreciate the protections of the First Amendment and see how vital a free press is to democracy.

I couldn’t disagree more. Those of us involved with news media — whether as journalists, students or educators — have a duty, an ethical obligation, to build trust with our communities and help ensure that understanding and appreciation.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin (who I now know is also a favorite of Nicholas Kristof’s) poses an interesting pairing of our freedoms — one that I’ve always found especially applicable to news media. The first concept is the one we all think about when we consider liberty, what he calls “negative freedoms.” This liberty depends on freedom from interference by others. In journalism, this means government is restrained from meddling in our activities – the press is “free from” interference.

But we often ignore Berlin’s twin concept, a positive or affirmative view of liberty. This tells us that people also have freedom to make decisions and serve as their own masters. The press is “free to” serve the public’s interest and build trust. It’s this second obligation that seems to get lost in cases like Mizzou. We’re so busy defending our “freedom from” that we forget to maximize our “freedom to.”

This kind of moral certainty, the absolute defense of a value we hold, troubled Berlin, who wrote, “Indeed, the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving of certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.”

And I think, in the end, it’s what troubled me. In so staunchly defending our rights, many of us overlooked the question of our responsibilities. In demanding to know why we were kept out, we failed to ask why people didn’t trust us enough to let us in. And that, to me, is the most important lesson Mizzou can teach us.

This piece originally appeared on MediaShift. Reposted here with permission.

Activist challenges the newsworthiness of violent police videos

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Despite social action spurred by released videos, one activist doesn’t think that footage of violent confrontations between police and citizens is the answer to changing popular culture.

Matthew Braunginn, co-founder of the Young Gifted and Black Coalition, said videos should be available as part of  public records, but it shouldn’t be publicized through news media.

He said the public shouldn’t require visual proof before having empathy for victims.

“We shouldn’t have heard about Bill Cosby with 30 rape victims to come out – it should have been the first,” he said.  “We shouldn’t have to have seen the video of Ray Rice dragging his wife out of the elevator for us to see how horrific it was.”

Braunginn said visual proof is also nonessential in the case of videos classified as public records, like police videos.

The release of videos showing violent acts continues to stir ethical debates by victim advocacy groups, law enforcement, news media, and audiences. Drawing attention to police brutality distributed body camera footage is a common argument for those hoping to change police culture.

Al Tompkins, senior faculty at the Poynter Institute, said violent videos should only be shown publicly if they tell the audience something they didn’t already know or understand.

“Graphic images don’t always have great value unless they shed light on the facts of the story in ways we can’t get without seeing those images,” Tompkins said.

At the end of November, video of a black teen shot a year before was released, making headlines. An organizer in Chicago’s chapter of Black Lives Matter said it was important for people to see the footage so police officers will be held accountable.

Squad car dashboard footage of a Chicago police officer fatally shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was released to the public against the McDonald family’s wishes after a freedom of information request was granted by a court.

Community members protested after the release of this graphic footage showing McDonald being shot 16 times.

The officer shown firing his gun was charged with first-degree homicide.

That the officer was charged the same day as the court ordered the video be released was said to show the power of video to affect change.

Tompkins said the value in releasing the video is to prove the Chicago police weren’t telling the whole story with the accurate details.

“In the case of the police officer shooting, that very graphic video, in fact, showed us a series of events that is contrary to what the police said occurred,” Tompkins said.

But, Braunginn said he thinks there are larger systemic factors at play.

“Black victims of police or state violence have to have overwhelming visual evidence that it has occurred for a lot of people to actually believe that it has happened,” he said.

“That’s the problem – we shouldn’t have to see it to believe how horrific it is,” Braunginn said.  “He shot him 16 times. Knowing the details should be enough in and of itself.”

“It’s become almost a fetish of seeing black death. We’re glorifying it and desensitizing ourselves to it,” he said.  “But this is really nothing new; this is just an evolution of public lynchings where whole towns used to get together to witness a lynching.”

Leland Pan, Dane County (Wis.) Board District 5 supervisor, said releasing videos promotes transparency.

“I think it’s important to protect the rights of privacy,” Pan said.  “But that being said, I think when we have such an issue of potential officer misconduct, I think it becomes really important to bring police practice into light.”

Police often oppose immediate release of videos that might be part of an investigation.

Cpt. Joe Balles with Madison police’s South District said timing is everything in the release of video footage in the case of a police brutality investigation.

In a the case of a police officer whose decision to shoot a suspect is questioned, the video might be evidence in two separate investigations: A criminal investigation and an internal investigation to see if police policies and procedures were followed.

In the criminal investigation, the district attorney decides if the officer should be criminally charged for improperly using deadly force, said Balles, who is part of the restorative justice program.

“In the first three months (or more) of this investigation, the media is denied access to the footage because it’s an ongoing criminal investigation and the officer could potentially be pending a prosecution,” Balles said.

Police camera footage is often withheld in cases of police brutality on the grounds that it is part of an ongoing investigation.

“That’s often the excuse they give, but it’s often not a very legitimate excuse,” Tompkins said.  “A reasonable person would ask how long it takes to investigate.  In Chicago, did it actually take a year to investigate the shooting?  It seems highly likely that it did.”

“What often happens is the video is withheld just because it’s not politically convenient to release it, and that’s not a good enough idea because that delay just breeds mistrust,” Tompkins said.

Depending on the length of the internal investigation –  which Balles said it is faster than the criminal one  – the police chief makes the decision to release the video.

“The community could be demanding to see that video, and the chief has to weigh their needs with his needs to ensure that there’s a fair and impartial investigation done,” Balles said.

When the videos are released, newsrooms must make decisions about how to share the video with the public.

Decisions about how to use the McDonald video varied from showing it in full, to not showing the shooting at the end, to showing only snippets.

When making a decision about releasing videos to the public,  Tompkins said news organizations should remember that videos that are part of the public record aren’t automatically newsworthy. And if they are newsworthy, there are a few important things to consider.

“It’s very important not to show it as ‘fight highlights’ but to put context on it,” Tompkins said.  “We have an obligation to the people involved to put some kind of understanding on it, especially when it’s graphic.”

He thinks body camera footage is a matter of public importance.

“Body camera video ought to be public records unless there’s an overwhelming reason not to allow it to be public – just in the same way that 911 calls are public and should be,” Tompkins said.

“It is interesting, isn’t it, that the video gets withheld when it fails to exonerate the officer but when it does show that the officer acted righteously the video seems to come forward pretty quick,” he said.

Braunginn said the release of violent and disturbing incidents differs when it involves black people versus white people.  When a white male commits a mass shooting, he said, CNN would give a trigger warning and only air the footage every 30 minutes.

“With Walter Scott they showed it on repeat over and over again – you couldn’t get away from it.  And they’re going to do it again with [Laquan McDonald] over and over again,” Braunginn said.

In South Carolina, Scott was gunned down by a police officer while running away from him.  Police dashboard footage captured Scott running from his car after the officer pulled him over for a broken tail light.

A bystander captured video of the events that ensued once the officer caught up to Scott.  The officer argued there was a struggle for his weapon, causing him to feel threatened and fire at Scott eight times while he ran away.

Braunginn said the news media and audiences need to examine their double standard for airing and watching violent videos.

“When it came to that white shooting, we have to think of the victim and be careful and respectful,” he said.  “But it’s part of not seeing black Americans as human – it’s desensitizing.”

Reporting on health: science journalism needs veracity

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It was not the best day for meat lovers. Front-page headlines Oct. 26 by every news outlet that day contained two words: meat and cancer.

Scientific evidences show that processed meats, like sausages and bacon, can cause cancer. And, red meat meat in general is also probably carcinogenic, according to a study conducted by the cancer research branch of the World Health Organization.

And in the first several lines of their stories about this research, few journalists and news editors failed to mention that processed meats were put into the same category of carcinogen with tobacco.

But as many critics pointed out, the narrative that hot dogs are as harmful as cigarettes is misleading. While regular consumption of processed meats can raise the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent according to the WHO report, heavy smokers are far more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers, blogger Zach Supalla wrote.

In an additional document, WHO also clarifies that the categorization of carcinogens is based on the sufficiency of evidence instead of the level of risk, explicitly stating that smoking and eating processed meat are not equally dangerous.

Covering science: not an easy task

The need to simplify scientific facts for readers sometimes conflicts with the complex nature of science, said Ron Seely, a long-time science journalist now working and teaching at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

Other times over-simplistic narratives sneak their way to news coverage solely because of the lack of space on the publication or the disconnections along the editing process, Seely said.

Statements out of context can misinform readers especially when the messages are conveying risks related to people’s daily life, Seely added, emphasizing the dicey aspect of health reporting.

A group of researchers have been developing algorithmic tools for science journalists to contextualize their stories. Science Surveyor, a project led by Columbia and Stanford scholars, aims at helping journalists with tight deadlines sort out academic literature for the covered issue.

People may not understand that a particular study is “just a piece along the way” in scientific investigation, Marguerite Holloway, a developer of the Science Surveyor from the Columbia Journalism School, said in an interview conducted by the school in 2009.

Journalists should not over-sell certain scientific findings, Holloway said.

The growing complexity and specialization of science makes it difficult for journalists to keep up with the changes, Seely said.

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Responsible reporting: people rely on you

To provide journalists with written references, WHO ensures that all the information about its research is available on its website, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said in an email.

Organizations like WHO need journalists to disseminate health information to the public in layman language, Hartl said.

Meanwhile, Hartl said he expected journalists covering health issues to at least have some background knowledge. It is more helpful for efficient communication between WHO and the public if the journalist is specialized in health reporting, Hartl said.

But this may not be the situation for the news industry nowadays, with shrinking resources dedicated to science reporting, Seely said.

News outlets have been sending less experienced general assignment reporters to cover life science story, given the abundance of press releases and press conferences by research institutes, Seely said.

Seely worried that this underestimate of the difficulty of science reporting will further hinder critical investigations, as the well established public relations sectors of health institutions and government agencies have already effectively controlled the information flow.

In many cases the exaggeration in media coverage comes directly from the research institutes’ press releases, which use sensational statements to catch media attention, Ben Goldacre, a London-based medical researcher, pointed out in a BMJ editorial.

Even reputable news outlets like the New York Times can make mistakes in health coverage, according to an article by David Freedman of the Columbia Journalism Review. Freedman thought that two Times articles about obesity, one claiming that maintaining weight loss is hardly possible and another that high-fat diets help weight loss, are fallacious and potentially encouraging bad decisions.

Seely’s suggested science reporters ask when they do not know. When interviewing experts, do not hesitate to let them repeat or explain for you and also for your audience.

“Remember that people are making decisions based on your reporting.” Seely said.

The Art of Covering Donald Trump: Ten Strategies for Journalists

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He has been called a “sham.” His campaign was initially dismissed as a “charade.” The Huffington Post relegated him to the entertainment page. And while elections experts maintain that he still is not the most likely candidate to win his party’s nomination for the presidency, the mainstream media spent late summer and early fall 2015 calling him “frontrunner.”

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has caused fits for his opponents to be sure, but his candidacy raises interesting ethical questions for the news media covering him, as well. Should mentions of Trump’s failed marriages, multiple bankruptcies and laundry list of controversial statements about all manner of people and groups be regular features of his media attention? How should Trump’s unique use (as compared to his opponents) of Twitter be covered?

In a photo dated Sept. 3, The Republican presidential front-runner met privately with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus Thursday afternoon, and soon after, came out to the lobby of Trump Tower to declare that he has signed a loyalty pledge. Photo and cutline by Michael Vadon

In a photo dated Sept. 3, The Republican presidential front-runner met privately with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus Thursday afternoon, and soon after, came out to the lobby of Trump Tower to declare that he has signed a loyalty pledge.
Photo and cutline by Michael Vadon

News practices expert Elizabeth Skewes, a professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, worries concerns about the ethics of covering Trump are coming too late.

“I wish this question had been explored when he really started running,” Skewes said. She added one reason for Trump’s place atop most polls is because “the media were covering him so much.”

George Washington University political scientist and blogger at The Monkey Cage John Sides conducted an analysis confirming Skewes’ hunch that Trump’s place in the polls correlates highly with how much attention he receives.

Skewes noted that “all that coverage gave Trump a legitimacy with voters that he might not have otherwise had.”

Imagine, for example, if Trump had been afforded the same (lack of) attention recent GOP nomination dropout Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal had received from the mainstream media.

Digital media law and ethics expert Paul Voakes of the University of Colorado-Boulder has been struck by how a political novice has been able to grab hold of the media narrative. “Media coverage of the Republican nomination should not be driven by the latest sound bite from Donald Trump, but sometimes it appears as though it is.”

So, should the media treat Trump differently? Not so fast, say the media ethics experts.

University of St. Thomas media ethics professor Wendy Wyatt argued that, “covering a candidate like Donald Trump shouldn’t be all that different from covering any other candidate.”

Top Ten Strategies for Covering Trump (and everyone else…)

The ethics experts I talked to offered a range of strategies for covering Trump, most of which they would want to apply to all of the other candidates for the Republican and Democratic nominations for President of the United States.

  1. Side-by-side comparisons of the candidates’ positions and experience

Skewes said the side-by-sides could even come “in chart form” so readers could compare the candidates’ experience, proposals and the likelihood their proposals would work. Wyatt added that journalists “should provide the context citizens need to make sense of news about all candidates.” Skewes suggested a comparison that highlighted candidates’ positions, experience, and an expert analysis of whether the plan is possible (or what conditions would be required to make the plan a reality).

  1. Ask the “why” and the “how” questions of all candidates

Saying that “I will build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” is not a plan. Asking Trump why the nation needs a wall, why the wall would stop the problem he articulates and how he intends to get Mexico to build it is important. Trump has talked about his views regarding why he wants to build one, but he couldn’t even handle a gentle role-playing question from Stephen Colbert (who was pretending to be the president of Mexico) about how he would persuade Mexico to build the wall. As Skewes noted, “he can’t fire Congress.” Thus, getting Trump to explain how he will get some of his difficult to implement ideas, such as rounding up 11 million people who are illegally in the United States and returning them to their country of origin, through the U.S. Congress is a required task for all campaign reporters.

  1. Do not mistake Twitter for public opinion

Voakes was quick to remind journalists and their audience that, “the danger in social media is to treat it and report it in a way that implies this is valid public opinion.” It does not. Research led by W. Russell Neuman has shown that there are times when Twitter traffic both precedes and responds to news coverage, but scholars do not yet have a handle on the twittersphere’s relationship with broad public opinion. After all, only about a quarter of Internet-using Americans are on Twitter – and they are much more interested in politics on average than those who do not tweet.

  1. (Mostly) ignore the outrageous

Trump’s social media behavior is particularly inflammatory – insulting other candidates for president, actresses and the people of Iowa. Trump’s recent riff on the veracity of Ben Carson’s claim that he was foiled from stabbing a friend because of a belt buckle is an example of the atypical style Trump employs on the campaign trail as compared to his GOP and Democratic counterparts. Trump is the outrageous gift that keeps on giving, but Voakes cautions that running to air or print the latest most outrageous statement of the day means that reporters, “will continue to report Trump out of proportion with A) other GOP candidates and B) the substance of what he is actually saying.”

  1. Explore proposals for a more inclusive debate strategy

While the ship has somewhat sailed on this one, Skewes called for a different debate format that was not primarily organized by a candidate’s standing in the polls. She said that having a main stage and “JV” debate gives the sense that candidates on the undercard and the main event candidates “at the end podiums. . .don’t matter. Just don’t focus on the center of the stage, it is almost hypnotic (the visual cue that the centered candidates are the important ones).” Other suggestions included a debate format where five or six of the crowded field of Republican candidates (drawn at random) appeared together at a time so that frontrunners and those at the bottom of the polls would be more likely to be mixed together and given more equal attention.

  1. Journalists should push all candidates to be specific in their proposals and to respond to substantive critiques of them.

If journalists are especially successful at #s 10 and 9, they should force candidates to respond to serious questions about their proposals. This is an especially difficult challenge when covering Trump because, as Voakes said, Trump is, “this personality who was entertaining and controversial before he announced his candidacy (and he) knows how to manipulate the dynamics of the soundbite. . .and now we have a platform of social media that Trump understands better than any of the other candidates” when it comes to saying what he wants to say — and nothing else — in response to critiques. Journalists will need to make peace with the inevitable attacks that will come their way if they call Trump out for not giving specific answers to important questions.

  1. Don’t talk to Trump

Echoing the well-worn journalism admonition that, “if your mother says she loves you, check it out” Skewes called on reporters to consider that, “the best way to cover Trump is by not talking to Trump. Talk to people who know him better, people who work with him and experts and other professionals who can analyze what he claims. We need that outside voice for all the candidates but particularly with Trump. He A) doesn’t realize his own limitations and B) says ‘that’s not true’ whenever he is challenged.”

  1. Journalists should consider things from all candidates’ lives that may affect their ability to govern

Politicians are humans. As presidential scholar Fred Greenstein has written about extensively, how presidents approach decision-making, stress and organizational capacity are crucial to their performance in office. Voakes added, “It would be valuable to see if the media can get people to engage (with) the candidates in a way that is beyond charisma.”

Fellow GOP candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio regularly highlight their immigrant roots but oppose more liberal proposals related to immigration reform. Jeb Bush has a father and a brother who have been president but insists he is his own man and will not be relying on the Bush family name to become the family’s third occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Carly Fiorina has been a business executive at the highest levels – but was fired. Hillary Clinton has been First Lady, a U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State who had her husband’s infidelities become a national punch line and the basis for impeachment proceedings.

Almost all of the candidates are married with children and many, Trump most certainly included, have had portions of their personal lives, and their kids’ lives, splashed all over the front page of the tabloids. Most are highly educated. Most are wealthy. They also lie. How have their lives – their opportunities and adversities – affected how they may make decisions at the highest political level?

  1. Journalists should help citizens understand who all candidates are as human beings

CNBC’s Becky Quick got at this in the widely panned debate she co-moderated when she quoted a critique of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg from Trump’s own website that Trump denied saying during the debate. The execution of her fact check was off (she initially could not remember from where she found the damning quote), but it was the right instinct. Wyatt went further, calling on journalists to ask about the candidates, “Are they people of integrity, have they been truthful, have they demonstrated respect for others?” and so forth.

  1. Stop focusing on the polls

Trump regularly touts his position in the national public opinion polls as evidence that he is for real. He may be. But while the media ethicists I spoke with didn’t bring this up, I will use my personal privilege as a political scientist and journalism professor to point out that a candidate’s performance in the polls at this (still early!) stage in the process is not highly correlated with whether she or he ends up being the nominee. Mitt Romney led some GOP primary polls in 2012 to be sure, but so did Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. Some of the also-rans led for a long period of time. None of them led for as long as Trump to be sure, but it is still far too early to be extrapolating one’s position in the primary polls a few months before the first primary election to their likelihood of winning the nomination.

In fact, when it comes to building a campaign organization and earning the endorsements of the party elites who are widely regarded as being key to winning the nomination, Trump appears to be at or near the bottom of the pack.

For that matter, using the polls to declare a candidate dead is dangerous as well. Less than a month before winning the 2004 Iowa caucus on his way to the Democratic nomination for president, John Kerry was polling at 4 percent

Following these strategies is hard work. It is especially hard when Trump is likely to answer tough questions about the details of his policies by bragging that they’ll be “great,” by attacking his opponents as “losers” or turning his attention to the media for asking “nasty questions.” As Skewes cautions, “the media should not be in the business of trying to ensure that Trump does not get elected,” but they can provide a more comprehensive picture of his candidacy to the voting public.

Michael W. Wagner is an associate professor and a Louis A. Maier Faculty Development Fellow in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also affiliated with the Department of Political Science.

Covering the Paris Attacks: Global Patriotism or Cultural Proximity?

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Reporters need to balance emotional impulses with a healthy dose of skepticism. This cautious approach shouldn’t fall by the wayside just because something terrible has happened. In fact, it’s in the coverage of tragedies like the Paris attacks that we need this balance the most. Continue reading →

Marijuana reviews: Advocating vice?

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Dining out at a restaurant, watching a show or buying a book—you can always refer to a review on a local newspaper before making the decision. Now you can do the same thing for getting some weed if you are in Oregon.

The Oregonian, the state’s largest newspaper, is recruiting a marijuana reviewer. Oregon became the fourth state legalizing recreational use of marijuana Oct. 1.

“The candidate should be an experienced cannabis consumer with deep knowledge about the variety of strains and products available on the Oregon market,” the job posting says.

The marijuana review is not brand-new invention, with the Cannabist, a supplement to the Denver Post, as the most prominent precedent. Nor is the ethical controversy over the media coverage about marijuana.

The press needs to be careful about its coverage about marijuana because lobbyists from both sides are willing to provide false information to sway marijuana public policy, said Roy Peter Clark, vice-president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in an email.

Serving the public?

The rapid change of media landscape has blurred many traditional borders, but news organizations should make sure that their practices serve the public interest, Clark said. And for him, pot reviews are not necessarily part of this task.

“We don’t do that for cigarettes,” he said. “We don’t do that for pharmaceuticals in general.”

And, he said he doesn’t see how pot is different.

“It’s hard to see the benefit of doing it for marijuana.”

Yet the marijuana critics think they are doing a meaningful job.

Ry Prichard, a marijuana reviewer and reporter at the Cannabist, said he understands the hesitation of the mainstream media writing about recreational use of marijuana. He said the Denver Post publishes reviews separately partly because of ethical concerns.

“But marijuana is everywhere here,” Prichard said. He thinks that journalists are responsible to report the large-scale discussion about marijuana after legalization in Colorado, and to reflect the popularity of recreational consumption in real life.

Prichard considers himself also as an educator when writing reviews, providing the public with necessary knowledge for purchasing marijuana. In a recently published review, Prichard reminded consumers to beware of the mislabeling of marijuana strains.

Organizations advocating more cautious regulations regarding marijuana still worry about mainstream news media like the Oregonian reviewing marijuana.

Kevin Sabot, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana , said in an email that news media are promoting a dangerous lifestyle. The critics are generalizing their own experience of marijuana being harmless to a wide audience, he said.

The reporter covering marijuana issue for the Oregonian and her editor both declined to comment.

Serving the industry?

The media are empowering the pot industry with a free pass, and attenuating the scientific debate about the effects of marijuana, Sabot said.

Sabot also said he thinks the journalists working behind marijuana stories may have their own skewed view and not disclaim their stance to the readers sufficiently.

He used the Huffington Post as an example. Arianna Huffington, the co-founder of Huffington Post, is also an honorary board member of the Drug Policy Alliance, a biggest organization advocating the decriminalization of marijuana use in the US. She has written commentary about the legalization debate for her website.

Prichard, who pays for the marijuana himself, said reviewing adult-only products can be a dicey job. But he does not think wine or beer reviews are more morally justified, either.

Ethics of robot journalism: How Automated Insights poses issues for data collection and writing

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Algorithm journalism is now available for everyone.

A beta Wordsmith, a program that creates journalism from data, was made available on the parent company’s website Tuesday morning, the company announced.

But, one of the world’s largest news organizations already uses the software to automatically generate some stories – and its standards editor said the ethics of the software has to be carefully considered.

“We want to make sure that we’re doing everything the way we should,” Associated Press standards editor Tom Kent said. “We take our ethics very seriously.”

During the past year, the AP multiplied its publication of earnings reports tenfold. The number of earning reports on a quarterly from the AP increased from 300 stories to nearly 3,000.

The mass quantity of stories that the software can produce has led to the moniker “robot journalism,” but Kent said questions have turned from the capacity of robot journalism to the ethics of this new production tool.

“Robot journalism” is less a C-3PO-like character typing the news, and more automation of data collection using algorithms to produce text news for publication. The process is forcing journalists like Kent to address best practices for gathering data, incorporating news judgment in algorithms and communicating these new efforts to audiences. The AP announced its partnership with Automated Insights, a Durham, North Carolina-based software company that uses algorithms to generate short stories, in June 2014.

Collecting Data

Accuracy is just one concern when it comes to algorithmically gathering data.

According to a January press release from Automated Insights, automated stories contain “far fewer errors than their manual counterparts” because such programs use algorithms to comb data feeds for facts and key trends while combining them with historical data and other contextual information to form narrative sentences.

New York Magazine writer Kevin Roose hypothesized similarly saying, “The information in our stories will be more accurate, since it will come directly from data feeds and not from human copying and pasting, and we’ll have to issue fewer corrections for messing things up.”

When errors do surface, the process for editing is more or less the same as for human writers: review, revise and repeat. Once editors catch algorithmic mishaps, developers make the changes to the code to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

“We spent close to a year putting stories through algorithms and seeing how they came out and making adjustments,” Kent said.

He also adds that a less obvious concern may have less to do with what data is collected and more to do with how it is collected.

“Data itself may be copyrighted,” Kent said. “Just because the information you scrape off the Internet maybe accurate, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the right to integrate it into the automated stories that you’re a creating – at least without credit and permission.”

Synthesizing and Structuring Data

Besides collecting data, the way in which algorithms organize information requires additional ethical consideration.

“To make the article sound natural, [the algorithm] has to know the lingo,” BBC reporter Stephen Beckett wrote in a September article. “Each type of story, from finance to sport, has its own vocabulary and style.”

Stylistic techniques like lingo must be programmed into the algorithm at human discretion. For this reason, Kent suggests that robot reporting is not necessarily more objective than content produced by humans and is subject to the same objectivity considerations.

“I think the most pressing ethical concern is teaching algorithms how to assess data and how to organize it for the human eye and the human mind,” Kent said. “If you’re creating a series of financial reports, you might program the algorithm to lead with earnings per share. You might program it to lead with total sales or lead with net income. But all of those decisions are subject – as any journalistic decision is – to criticism.”

Since news judgement and organization are ethical questions that carry over from traditional reporting to robot journalism, Kent’s suggestion is to combat them in the same way.

“Everyone has a different idea about what fair reporting is,” he said. “The important thing is that you devote to your news decisions on automated news the same amount of effort you devote to your ethics and objectivity decisions at any other kind of news.”

Sharing Data

Finally, journalists must make decisions about the extent to which they engage audience members in the process of robot journalism.

University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism Prof. Lucas Graves, whose research focuses on new organizations and practices in the emerging news ecosystem, says disclosure is a must.

“I absolutely think outlets should be disclosing the use of algorithms,” he said. “If they aren’t, then they need to be asking themselves why.”

Kent echoes similar sentiments and goes even further in his Medium piece suggesting that outlets provide a link identifying the source of the data, the company that provides the automation and explain how the process works.

As algorithms develop and become more complicated into the future, Kent also advises that journalists remain diligent in both understanding how algorithms work, as well as how they interact with journalism ethics.

“As complicated as the algorithm gets, you have to document it carefully so that you always understand why it did what it did,” he said. “Just as any journalist who covers a particularly area should periodically reevaluate how she writes about the topic, we should always reevaluate algorithms. There is nothing about automated journalism that makes it less important to pay attention to ethics and fairness.”

Sensationalism or a Call to Action: Covering the Syrian Refugee Crisis

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I met a Syrian refugee this June. Sitting across from me in a crowded Beirut café, the young man told me how he’d escaped from Syria and started working as a news fixer in Lebanon—arranging interviews for journalists and translating when they couldn’t speak Arabic. Later, he’d moved to Turkey and launched a media company—but that had been a challenge because he enjoyed no official legal status in Turkey. He also found it difficult to travel to Europe in order to build his company’s brand.

So, the young man told me, he was back in Lebanon to say a permanent goodbye to his friends in Beirut. This was because he was getting ready to take an “all-or-nothing” chance and swim from the western coast of Turkey to the nearest Greek island. There, he would get a fake ID that would allow him to travel to Sweden, where he’d learned he’d be granted residency.

I don’t know if he made it. After that day in the crowded Beirut café, I never heard from him again. But I’ve been thinking about him lately, as the story of traveling Syrian refugees has flooded the mediascape, and as the image of a drowned Syrian 3-year-old has caught the world’s attention. Maybe my friend has been tracking the events in Hungary and Austria from another crowded café, this one in Stockholm. But then again, maybe not.

One thing this young man told me before our interview ended was that he’s lost all faith in the potential of journalism. He said that the coverage of the Syrian crisis has done nothing to help people like him. I wonder what he’d think of this most recent explosion of news coverage on the Syrian refugees, coverage that raises a number of questions relevant to global journalism ethics.

Syrian refugee camp in Greece. Photo dated September 2012.

Syrian refugee camp in Greece. Photo dated September 2012.

Here, I’d like to examine the question of focus. I’d like to ask when it’s ethical (and when it’s not ethical) for international news media to focus so relentlessly on the trauma that individual people endure. Are there times when it’s ethically necessary to get in the face of death and despair and snap a picture or shoot a video? Are there times when those images must be distributed around the world, regardless of the impact this may have on the individuals who are suffering?

The drowning death of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi certainly invites these questions, since his image has surfaced on numerous media sites, in various stages of censorial blurriness. Nilufer Demir, the Turkish photographer who shot the image, asserts that she wanted to “express the scream of his silent body.” Since then, activists across the world have redistributed that image, in an effort at calling attention to the plight of Syrian refugees, almost five years into the Syrian civil war. Following this, the BBC has asked if this one picture has somehow “shifted our view of refugees.” The image has even inspired U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to attest that the U.S. could do more to protect them. So in one sense, it seems that Demir’s decision to snap a picture of a dead baby on a beach was indeed an ethically justifiable decision.

Yet, even before his own trip from Turkey to the Greek islands, my Syrian friend told me that he, like many Syrians, had lost all faith in the potential of journalism to change his situation. He had briefly worked as a news fixer, not because he wanted to help change the world, but because he needed money to survive. A number of local journalists I interviewed in Beirut over the summer echoed my friend’s doubt. They had long been working with Syrian activists, and knew their frustrations. Years of fruitlessly uploading their images to YouTube had led most Syrians to resent rather than celebrate the foreign news media who covered their oppression, they told me. According to them, help could have come much sooner, and if it comes now, it will not come as a result of western news coverage of the Syrian crisis.

So the question has to be asked: Who is this coverage really for? Is the international distribution of the “captivating” and “horrifying” image of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi capable of comforting his family? Is it capable of inspiring anything other than the rather useless and clichéd compassion of people who will never know such pain (and will never lift a finger to help in any way)?

Young Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Photo dated September 2012.

Young Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Photo dated September 2012.

The admission of more than 5,000 refugees into Austria on Sept. 5 might at first suggest that real change is finally coming. After all, British Prime Minister David Cameron has also just pledged to resettle “thousands more Syrian refugees.” Now, rather than stagnating in the impoverished and disease-ridden camps that crowd parts of Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, maybe these people have a chance at really living again. Maybe these images of traumatized Syrian children (and adults, for that matter) have had an impact that makes them ethically justifiable despite their invasive quality.

The problems become clearer, however, when we start to investigate the less flashy coverage of the Syrian crisis—the coverage that crunches numbers and analyzes concrete trends, instead of merely creating high-resolution slide shows of other people’s suffering. For example, the Washington Post recently reported that since the Syrian war began in 2011, the U.S. and Britain have done little to nothing to relocate the Syrian refugees: the U.S. has resettled only 1,541 refugees since 2011, and Britain has resettled only 216. Other coverage shows that the wealthy Gulf nations rarely help the refugees at all and that some European nations remain opposed to offering any space within their borders. Rather than framing personal trauma in a salacious fashion, this type of news reporting does a much better job of informing the world about what’s really happening to the Syrian refugees.

It’s one of our truisms that ethical journalism must be balanced, and it must give the public what it needs. This increasingly global public needs to know the big numbers and the inconvenient details. While emotional images of dead or traumatized individuals may help to inspire public sentiment, “outrage” and “compassion” are not enough. People need to understand the sticky truths and the diplomatic hypocrisies that plague national and international policies on refugees in the 21st Century. In the case of Syria, the job of international journalists is to illuminate the growing connections and chasms between the Syrian refugees and the nations to which they flee.