Real Journalism

Roughly four years ago, CommonDreams wrote an article about how Senator Dianne Feinstein wanted the shield law to only apply to “real journalists,” saying that WikiLeaks’ employees and nonsalaried reporters shouldn’t receive those protections. 

Having studied journalism for the past three years, I’ve learned that everyone has their own definition about what a “real journalist” is. When it’s an interviewee, that usually means someone that isn’t going to press them very much on the issues. President Trump is a classic example of this. He often labels media organizations that scrutinize him “fake news.” “Real news” or “real journalism” are the journalists or pundits out there that are on his side.

This has definitely been my experience when working with public relations officials. Many public relations officials are former journalists, themselves. They have a tendency to idealize their journalism days and lecture journalists about how they should do journalism. They want journalists to make their jobs easier, but often times, journalists are supposed to do things that would make their jobs harder.

Last semester, I covered a protest event that the contingent faculty held outside of the Board of Trustee’s IC 2020 Cocktail party. At first, I interviewed one of the contingent faculty professors. Not knowing a lot about this issue (I was assigned to the story at the last minute and only knew what I read about it), I asked him a bunch of easy questions. Next, I interviewed David Maley, who is basically the spokesperson for the college. After hearing some of the first interviewee’s responses, I asked him a bunch of tough questions. I got the sense that he was used to this from Ithacan reporters and he didn’t challenge my journalism. After Maley, I talked to a physical education professor. I can’t remember specifically what he taught, but I remember pushing back at some of his points with points that David Maley had brought up when I talked to him.

My questions weren’t that tough (and I was personally probably on his side of the debate), but he DID NOT LIKE my questions. He told me that my job as a journalist was to press the college administration because they were oppressing the contingent faculty and to be more supportive of the contingent faculty. I had asked very similar questions to Taylor Ford, who was organizing student support for the contingent faculty and he was fine with my questions. Part of the purpose of asking those questions was because I wanted to be objective in my reporting and because I wanted to get quotes of them responding to some of David Maley’s points.

A few weeks later, I was at another contingent faculty event. I was not covering it – it was a private meeting that I wasn’t supposed to go to, but accidentally went to. After the meeting I talked to him again about that issue. He was eating raw lettuce, some of which was spewing onto my face. He had thought about the issue further and told me that real journalists shouldn’t be objective. He brought up the global warming debate as an example. To me, global warming was different because that’s an issue of objective facts. The contingent faculty debate was an issue of fact-based differing points of view. We had a somewhat friendly back-and-forth and that was that.

My point is that there are a lot of people, particularly people that haven’t done a day of journalism in their lives, that love to lecture journalists about how they should be doing their job. It’s a lot easier to talk about doing something than it is to actually do something. 

Going back to the CommonDream article, of course, nonsalaried journalists are “real journalists.” You don’t need to get paid to be a “real journalist.” In terms of the Wikileaks issue, I believe that the people behind Wikileaks should receive legal protection as well. However, I must mention my deep reservations about what they do at Wikileaks. I don’t like the indiscriminate leaking of documents. I don’t think that’s good practice. But we need to be consistent on the issue of protecting journalists. I believe that the New York Times had the right to publish the Pentagon Papers, and believe that this applies to Wikileaks as well. 

The only caveat I have with the premise of the CommonDreams article is that the writer seems to believe that journalists’ sources deserve legal protections as well. I disagree with that. I think journalists should do everything in their power to protect their sources, but people that expose some of the country’s secrets should not be protected legally if they are not protected by the Whistleblower Protection Act. 

For example, if someone leaks information to the press about a CIA operation to prevent North Korea from launching inter-ballistic missile tests, I believe the journalists that publish that information (even though I believe they shouldn’t publish information like that) should be protected and the leaker should be prosecuted if discovered. 

This is the ideological compromise I have to make because of my interests as a US citizen and my interests as a journalist.