Wednesday, September 12, 2007

In the Eye of the Beholder

Paul Giacobbe

         
Recently a viewer emailed her concern about the coverage of a murder in front of the el Tiburon in Providence.  The story related how a local man was shot in front of the bar and featured an interview with the man’s cousin, who had set up a sidewalk memorial for the dead man.  The cousin then called the murderers punks and challenged them to try and kill him, also.

The viewer thought that broadcasting the man’s challenge was inappropriate and likely to incite more violence.  She was right.

But when I saw the report the night it aired, it didn’t immediately strike me as wrong.  I thought of it as a good, day-after story and an interesting look at the culture in which killings result from minor or perceived insults or transgressions.  The viewer saw the other side of the story, the danger of permitting the cousin to issue his challenge.  I didn’t. 

The episode was a reminder of how differently people view the same news story.  I get a lot of emails and telephone calls.  Many of them are from clearly intelligent, articulate people who are so focused or invested in a cause or philosophy that they appear unable to see or understand that there may be another side to the issue.  They invariably complain about any story – even a story that by any objective standard is balanced – that gives even the slightest voice to the position opposing their own, or that does not fully and in detail explain all of the points favoring their position.

What is frequently the most frustrating aspect of this type of complaint is dealing with the complainant’s firmly held belief that the failure of the story to cover his or her position adequately is not due to inadvertence or neglect – or simply bad journalism – but some sort of bias or conspiracy by the reporter and/or the station.

I do think that a reporter with a bias can skew the outcome of what on its face is a balanced story.  For example, do interviews with advocates from each side but choose the most articulate for the position you favor, and the least capable representing the other point of view. But I don’t think that such things happen nearly as often as many viewers think they do, and I believe it is even more unusual in local television news.

The people who report your local news generally don’t know what they’re going to cover until they arrive at work.  They then have a few hours to gather facts, conduct interviews, condense those facts and interviews into a 90 second report and coordinate the audio and video in time for the evening news show.  Even if so inclined, that doesn’t leave much time to conspire to slant the facts of a story.