TV news stations would do well to let news sources have their own words. If someone cusses, happily or angrily or whatever, why the hell are they bleeping it out of some prudish desire to censor a source's honest expression? And why are the viewers expected to be too sensitive to handle it, if indeed the story is important enough to be worth telling? Do we bleep a soldier getting shot in a war zone? Do we bleep protesters at a march? If we do, are we telling the story honestly?
Of course, those questions would
require understanding of reporting techniques and
a wall between church and state in the newsroom, neither of which aren't really a priority when you're copying a story off the wire service. (The reason swearing gets bleeped is
advertisers, and fear of losing them.) To be clear, I have both copied stories from rival publications and cut swearing. These things happen. I understand why they happen. These are conversations that take place in newsrooms, and a while back in this sub-forum we talked a bit about the importance of fact-checking and media literacy, which are both things that derive from and rely upon ethical decisions made by journalists on a day-to-day basis. It's not a conversation the should involve gloating, or humilitating the source, or our own moral judgment about whether she violated some arbitrary principle, at least not in the context of reporting.
In this case, I have issues with slapping an inaccurate headline on the story and issues with the order of information in both the piece(s) and their ledes. These make it seem like she lost the internship because she offended Hickam. But this isn't actually true. Hickam wasn't offended. She lost the job because someone at NASA was monitoring a hashtag. A good editor would fix the headline and lede, if said editor hadn't likely been laid off a couple months ago. Instead, these stories put a catchy "she lost the job because she swore" half-truth above clarity to the reader. That's poor writing and worse reporting. If I am editing and I see something like this in a post-mortem, there is going to be considerably more profanity than features in this story. I've both given and received.
If I'm assigned this story, here's my thought process. Expletives on Twitter are commonplace. Her mistake was tagging #nasa in one. Note, though, that it's a
hashtag, not @nasa, the user account. No one owns Twitter hashtags, nor would that pop in @nasa's notifications unless it was being monitored. So really, basic social media professionalism would entail knowing that hashtags aren't the same as users. People use #nasa all the time. If I want to have a profanity-filled rant about the Voyager probe (and do I!) I might well use the #nasa hashtag. You know what the story here is? That a bunch of NASA admins spend their days monitoring the #nasa hashtag for perceived offences against civility by their interns. I wonder how much they
pay those interns, in exchange for complete control over what they say? Given NASA is a government agency, and thus beholden the First Amendment, I'm all of a sudden real curious how they handle political speech by employees. If I'm an enterprising reporter, I'm calling NASA here and asking what they were thinking firing some highly-qualified young engineer over a simple profanity and misunderstanding. I'm pulling their financial records to see how much money they waste on social media agencies every year compared to one intern's salary. I want to know which admin had a problem with the post and I want to know which political causes said admin donated to in the last five years. Very likely, I've already found a more newsworthy story there, but if not, I'm calling the woman (can we please stop calling her "girl"? It's demeaning), asking about her college scores, why she wants to intern for NASA, and her background so that I can include all the information a reader needs. Then I'm turning around and pitching a magazine that'll take a couple thousand words about the privilege of "professionalism"
.
But piling on feels good, and sells a couple hundred words we can slap tracking ads on, so there's that. That way, when the reporters get laid off in two months, we can all feel outraged about how journalism is under threat.
If you're reading this thread, go subscribe to an independent local outlet or something. Not WaPo or the NYT--they're media empires, and they have their place, but find something doing solid, on-the-ground local reporting. There are a lot of good indie start-ups operating on an ad-free subscription-model these days, but barring that find your local daily or weekly and get it delivered every morning. It does not matter if you agree with the paper's editorial stances. Read the news section. Find one that doesn't just reprint the wire.
(A small and only semi-related addenda: a lot of these issues come up because we're confusing opinion reporting and news reporting. The stories I linked, both from reputable papers, are news stories but because they're rushed they operate on the assumption that "this was wrong, let's report that" instead of asking a factual question. The fact that she swore is reported largely without context. This isn't a news reporting process, but an opinion one, where the principle drives the question, such as it is. The distinction is important,
and was part of a sticky AW Admin put up a couple weeks ago. If I'm writing a column about this, I might decide the intern was unprofessional, and use her lack of professionalism to make a larger point about professionalism in broader culture--the larger point is important because a good column isn't about attacking some random stranger but about using an event to make a considered and valuable comment. That thought process does involve a moral and/or cultural starting point, because a column is commentary, and should be identified as such. And part of a good columnist's job is getting the readership riled up, so I might go with a head like "Twitter's Potty-Mouthing Has No Place at NASA". That makes my position clear and makes the commentary clear. With a news story, that position has no place in my reporting. There is no thesis, no judgment. I can think what I will of NASA and the woman involved--I think it's a gaffe, in fact--but my line of inquiry has to consider her role in the story, NASA's, and so on. What happened? How, and in what order? Why does it matter? Those questions each take me to a slightly different answer. No answer is 100% objective, and my line of questioning would reveal bias, but it's my and my editor's job to structure and revise the story meticulously so that the story doesn't take the position as pre-supposed.
It's a tricky process, and not one I was ever especially good at, which is why I prefer writing fiction to writing journalism. It's a myth that journalism is objective, but it's equally a myth that all news reporting has to represent a position. The process is different with a news story. They are not commentary. They do not start from a moral position.
In the world of online news, there is considerable blurring of the line between news reporting and opinion writing, so that definitions AW Admin gave arguably don't even apply. The danger, particularly when you get one writer doing both in a bare-bones newsroom or even freelance, is that you lose that vetting/self-analyzing process that I was always terrible at. But in the process, you lose the actual practice of inquiry that makes reporting function. You can't just evaluate a
news story by whether you agree with it. You have to look at what information it provides, and extrapolate the line of questioning to figure out what was and wasn't asked. Experienced reporters--there are too few these days--are really, really good at letting the reader know this, which is why you get "so-and-so refused to comment for this story". They show their work.
As readers, expect better of journalists. Be informed consumers of news.)
