Noelle Clemente
“Reporting is a constant process of making choices,” according to Janna Anderson, Reporting professor at Elon University. The intention of good reporting is to help people make the right choices in times of distress. A “storyteller who uses the details to help people find meaning, justice, education, illumination, emotion, entertainment, equality and the way to survive and work well together,” adds Anderson.
“Our job is only to hold up the mirror – to tell and show the public what has happened,” according to a report of Walter Cronkite, known once as the most trusted man in America. That title credits Cronkite with arguably the most important quality in a journalist.
If reporters are considered a helping hand in decision-making, those receiving that advice had better trust their source. For the latter half of the twentieth century television was the main source of news and information for most Americans.
The Vietnam War was the first television war and thus had no set precedent for how it should be covered. Reporters went wherever they wanted whenever they wanted and the evening news aired all footage they received.
Today, when technology has progressed to the point where everything is available at the click of a button, footage of the Iraq War seems to be missing.
When newspapers first began they were monitored and controlled by the government. They have since progressed and bask in the glory of free press. Television news seems to have moved in the opposite direction.
The first televised war aired and printed images of anything, despite how graphic it was. Today Americans do not even see the coffins of soldiers as they return from Iraq.
So where does the trust fall? Do Americans trust anchors that will report the facts while omitting the more graphic truths? Or do they trust the news that reports everything, unplugged? What was it about Cronkite’s reporting that gained him the title as the most trusted man in America?
“Reporting is about social consciousness and awareness. It’s about knowing people, cultures, systems and how they work or how they don’t work,” said Anderson. If this is the case, then it seems broadcasters have determined that Americans no longer want to see the direct effects of war on the nightly news.
In fact, it is a ban put in place by the Clinton administration and reinforced by the Bush administration to ban showing the coffins returning from war.
Viewers have developed trust in networks and anchors, but does this mean they also must trust the government? Reporters must make choices. Ultimately, reporters answer to their audience.
Reporters in Vietnam and Iraq were and are involved in the harsh realities of war. The difference is in how the reporters have chosen to evaluate and distribute their experiences to their audiences.
ABC reporter Bob Woodruff and a cameraman were seriously injured while reporting in Iraq in early 2006. An article about these injuries quotes ABC senior producer Kate Felsen saying, “He wanted to get out and report the story and not be locked in and taking information from someone else who was experiencing it.”
“Reporting is about persistence and determination,” Anderson said. Viewers trust the most dedicated and determined reporters because they are receiving their information from someone else. Limiting the degrees of separation makes for more accurate and trustworthy news coverage.
Equally important is lack of bias in reporting. “Objective journalism and an opinion column are about as similar as the Bible and Playboy magazine,” according to Cronkite.
Finding the balance of these characteristics is the beginning of good reporting.
Trust. Social awareness. Lack of bias.
