Model of a modern news slant job. Joel Thurtell photo.
By Joel Thurtell
[donation]
Good morning. Welcome to another lecture at Joel’s J School, where we teach the principles of news gathering and writing as they are actually practiced in the real workaday world of Journalism.
Here at Joel’s J School we are the reality show of Journalism, and unlike accredited J schools, tuition at our unaccredited JJS virtual campus is free.
Today, I would like to teach you how to implant your own peculiar opinions into a news story while seeming to remain a dispassionate, objective reporter. This is necessary because of an unwritten rule, nonetheless subscribed to by all academically-trained Journalists, that requires we Journalists be above the fray, disconnected from human life forms and concerned only with providing an accurate if mechanical report of events.
In a future lecture, I’ll discuss why all this objectivity is hokum. I’ll show why it’s an illusion to believe that anyone, much less a “trained” Journalist, can actually be objective or dispassionate. Today, I want to focus on the practical need to use deception in crafting a news story so that the article appears to meet your publisher’s demand for balance and fairness while in fact advancing a point of view, opinion, slant, bias.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention, the requirement that news stories be objective, fair and balanced was itself crafted by those illusion-masters, the publishers and owners of news media, along with their willing hand-maidens, the academic Journalism schools which probably will look askance at a freebooting, no-tuition rival like Joel’s J School.
I should also mention that while I’ve actually taught in a bona fide academic Journalism school, I’ve never endured so much as an hour of academic Journalistic training. Whether that’s good or bad, I’ll let others judge.
No I won’t! It’s great. Those of us who have not endured classic Journalism indoctrination have to break down fewer barriers to independent thinking, though it’s still a constant struggle. Further discussion of independent thinking I’ll leave to my forthcoming Journalism textbook, SHOESTRING REPORTER.
Okay, back to the fine art of slanting news stories. Today I’ll heap laurels on The New York Times. On Saturday, July 19, 2008, a Times writer — or maybe it was his editors — managed to slip bias into a story right from the get-go in a textbook case of stealth propaganda that will be used as a case study for years to come here at Joel’s J School.
Let’s look at what the Times accomplished in a Page One story on July 19, 2008: They took up a controversial issue involving the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights guaranteeing citizens freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. With deft sleight of wording, they made that guarantee seem silly and ill-conceived.
Now, as someone who’s been hassled by cops for no valid reason, I have a healthy regard for the Bill of Rights and its principles of due process. I also have no faith in the ability of human institutions such as police departments to behave intelligently or rationally without constant surveillance, goading and outright butt kicks.
August 26 will be the 40th anniversary of the day Chicago’s finest pulled me and a buddy out of a car in front of the Art Institute, whacked us with billy clubs and threw us in jail for no cause. Oh yes, come to think of it, there was a cause. We were young, with sideburns and mustaches, and it happened during the police riot masterminded by Mayor Richard Daley the First that placed its immortal stamp of villainy on the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Now, in this story, the biggest challenge for the Times was legitimizing an idea roughly equivalent to th notion that a car with a mechanical defect will fix itself.In this case, it’s teh contention that institutions like police departments will somehow improve and correct themselves without both positive and negative incentives from the constitutional system.
Now, anyone with common sense would know that human institutions require constant vigilance and thorough monitoring to keep them functioning honestly and humanely.
Anyone with common sense would not include U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who the Times quotes approvingly as believing that in these modern times, police agencies are more professional than in earlier times.
The challenge for the Times was to somehow dress up Justice Scalia’s “Alice in Wonderland” fantasy and make it seem palatable. And there the Times does an absolutely superb job of creating imbalance, laying down a slurpy foundation of fresh manure and making the whole presentation appar to conform to the vaguely-prescribed tenets of Journalistic fairness, balance, objectivity.
My hat is off to the Times — they have erected a monument of scoundrelly misrepresentation and logical legerdemain. Beautifully executed.
The Times managed to employ all the elements of fairness and balance in its story, so nobody could charge them with slanting it. This is the ultimate goal of the Journalistic Slanter, and the Times deserves some kind of prize. Sorry to say, Joel’s J School doesn’t hand out Journalism awards because our faculty believes that prizes create incentives that corrupt and pollute the pure cause of Journalism. That the major academic Journalistic institutions issue awards is further proof of their participation in the denigration and derogation of Journalism in America.
But back to the Times writer and editors, whose art is truly stunning. Note that they did not begin this article in a pedestrian way by summarizing opposing views about their topic, which happened to be police search and seizure and the so-called “exclusionary rule.” No way, Jose. They could have led by stating the exclusionary rule says that if a cop searches your house without a warrant and finds evidence of a crime, the court must toss the evidence — and probably any hope of getting you convicted of a crime — because the evidence was gotten illegally. And they might have followed by stating that while this is tough medicine for the cops, it’s a stern warning that we Americans take due process a hell of a lot more seriously than it’s regarded in any other country in the world including our neighbor to the north, Canada.
That would have been fair and balanced, but that’s not what we’re after. Remember, this is a lecture about injecting bias, subtly, so it doesn’t appear to be bias. And the Times did a masterful job of masking their intent by leading this story with an anecdote from Canada.
I quote:
Bradley Harrison was driving a rented Dodge Durango from Vancouver to Toronto in the fall of 2004 with 77 pounds of cocaine in the trunk when a police officer pulled him over, found the drugs and arrested him.
A year and a half later, an Ontario trial judge ruled that the officer’s conduct was a “brazen and flagrant†violation of Mr. Harrison’s rights. The officer’s explanation for stopping and searching Mr. Harrison — confusion about a license plate — was contrived and defied credibility, the judge said, and the search “was certainly not reasonable.â€
In the United States, that would have been good news for Mr. Harrison. Under the American legal system’s exclusionary rule, the evidence against Mr. Harrison would have been suppressed as the result of an unlawful search.
But both the Canadian trial judge and an appeals court refused to exclude the evidence. Mr. Harrison was sentenced to five years in prison.
“Without minimizing the seriousness of the police officer’s conduct or in any way condoning it,†the Court of Appeal for Ontario ruled in Mr. Harrison’s case in February, “the exclusion of 77 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of several millions of dollars and the potential to cause serious grief and misery to many, would bring the administration of justice into greater disrepute than would its admission.†The case is now before the Canadian Supreme Court.
I see a hand back there — you in the blue polo shirt, what is your question?
Ah yes, why lead a story about the U.S. Constitution with a yarn out of a foreign country?
Good question. Our goal is to obscure, remember, not clarify. Deception is our game. A guy gets arrested by a yokel cop in Canada who finds 77 pounds of cocaine in the skell’s car. Do we let him go because the evidence was gotten illegally and thus send a potent message to cops and the public that they need to either get better training, get smarter cops or suffer the same stiff lessons of exclusion every time they screw up?
Or do we copy the Canadians and try him, using the coke as evidence despite the bad seizure, because we want to keep the bum and his drugs off the street? And by so doing, wink at the thuggish cop and let him know he can foul up any time he pleases?
Oops, but tacked onto the lead is that little codicil about the Canadian Supreme Court still having to decide this case.
So not only do we have a case from outside United States jurisdiction and no precedent value in our jurisprudence, but we find out at the end of the lead that this anecdote is not cut and dried, but still a matter of debate.
But that’s okay. We have to bury that mention, or otherwise readers may notice that our model case is not exactly as clearcut and set in stone as our choice of it for top billing implies. By choosing this — as it turns out — shaky example, we’re justified in ridiculing the jurists who believe that if the tree is corrupt, so is its fruit, and if the evidence was gotten illegally, use of it will corrupt not only this particular case, but society as well.
By slamming the concept that ill-gotten evidence shouldn’t be used, we set a tone in the story that will always put people on the defensive who believe that cops should respect due process.
But nobody can come out and accuse the Times of doing this, because they certainly quote people on both sides. It’s just that the due process side gets kind of stuck towards the inside and end of the story after the vast majority of readers have tuned out, having had their impressions set by the murky lead.
The elements of balance and fairness are there, even if they’re diabolically distributed.
It’s a technical thing — make sure it APPEARS fair, according to the principles of academic Journalism.
What more can you ask of a Journalist than an illusion of fairness?
Mission accomplished.
Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
