AP:
O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and friend Ronald Goldman are found dead in Los Angeles. Simpson is arrested after a widely televised freeway chase in his white Ford Bronco.
O.J. Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, were stabbed and slashed to death outside her condominium in the trendy Brentwood neighborhood. The former football star was arrested after fleeing from police in a 90 minute chase along the 405.
accurate statements about things that have already happened, => minus any added linguistic flair
That second example has unnecessary additives that nudge emotion and has no place in journalistic integrity. At that point it becomes creative writing.
To illustrate, here's another AP story on the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, chosen as a deliberately extreme example of linguistic flair being used to educate an American audience on the little-known horrors of the Holocaust being uncovered in Europe:
The U.S. 42nd and 45th divisions captured the infamous Dachau prison camp today and freed its 32,000 captives. [...] Jan Yindrich and I a few minutes later saw the same thing that greeted the soldiers -- 39 open-type railroad cars ... which went through the walls of Dachau camp. At first glance the cars seemed loaded with dirty clothing. Then you saw feet, heads, and bony fingers. More than half the cars were full of bodies, hundreds of bodies. Downward was driving a jeep along a string of cars when a soldier shouted: "Come here, quick, Colonel, here's a live one!" [...] This grisly spectacle was outside the walls of the camp -- along a widely traveled road inside the city of Dachau where Bavarians passed daily.
But I agree there is a type of journalism -- I think there is another name for it but I can only think of photo-journalism atm -- where creative writing, or linguistic flair, can and does contribute if done in good faith (integrity).
What happens now is journalists throw around secondary and tertiary sources without attribution.
It's okay to report "Bob Jones commented 'Someone is a miserable SOB'." It's not okay to report "Someone is a miserable SOB" as if it's fact not judgement.
None of this is a new variant of journalism. It's just journalism and/or history practices that somehow got forgotten despite the fact that we teach these primary vs secondary source concepts and proper quoting in middle/high school in the US.
I think the test should instead be, if after reader your text, does the reader reconstruct the facts you didn't include? Then you are impartial.
The goal of the article should be to minimize reconstruction error of facts not included. That's when it conveys things correctly.
Did you mean the first one leave out information? The second one includes unnecessary "flair" (extraneous emotive words) that could be used to create negative public opinion about Simpson (or pre-trial public defense of him that makes it difficult for people to admit they judged too soon) before a trial where the evidence will be presented.
Such as: >> were stabbed and slashed to death outside her condominium in the trendy Brentwood neighborhood. The former football star was arrested after fleeing from police in a 90 minute chase along the 405.
Unnecessary things include "football star" and "stabbed and slashed to death" (the gore is not at all necessary and being that they did not have a murder weapon at the time or forensics to determine the cause until some time after the death, it should not be suggested that it was a knife during the reporting of the incident). Also using the term "fleeing" for anyone that did not watch it live may be suggestive that he was reckless (which he wasn't, I watched it -- I am a Houston sports fan even though I don't care much for basketball), and reckless is far more likely to make one think, yep guilty. But he did have police after him which the first one reports in a much more neutral way. Also, "in the trendy Brentwood neighborhood" oh okay, so rich people, I guess I am suppose to grab some popcorn and engage in pre-trial drama now because it wasn't some everyday murder in the unsavory parts of the south side in Chicago, or Inglewood, CA? How is that information useful? The facts of the case presented in the first one already suggest it is not a murder spree so no one in the area need be concerned there is an unknown serial killer creeping around.
*This is in no way what so ever hinting or suggesting at my opinion of the actual outcome of the trial, only more details on my thoughts about the news reporting aspects you replied too.
The first one doesn't even indicate that anyone has been killed with weapons. If you saw the first version you could think 'carbon monoxide?' with the second version you know that it wasn't.
Stabbed and slashed to death is critical information. Football star is maybe not important, but it signals in what sort of environment the killing happened, similarly the mention of the trendy neighbourhood.
The goal should be to minimize reconstruction error of excluded facts. If you do, then you will represent everything you have seen. This necessarily means focusing on the surprising bits.
I agree that the job of an investigative reporter is to minimize reconstruction error of excluded facts.
The above is not investigative reporting, it is simply news reporting. Emotive speculation and nudging should be kept to a minimum, preferably not included at all to prevent the emotional speculation the second option is nudging people toward (it is not trying minimize reconstruction error of excluded facts, as all the facts of a crime at the time of reporting on an arrest are not known).
Using the second one for news reporting is polluting the jury pool by stirring up emotions before facts of an investigation are presented.
Indeed, but which one are you implying is impartial?
Also, I don't know why the status quo is inherently a bad thing, wouldn't it all depend on what that status quo was in relation to whatever issue? Shouldn't we ant a society where the status quo is optimal? Not simply being contrarians.
An impartial news would talk about positives of different changes, not say that change is bad, so no it isn't biased towards status quo.
> I'm not ceding this ground. [...] The customer is not always right, and everything is not relative.
The humanities have long ago dispensed with facts since the advent of postmodernism; the ground has already been ceded. Yuval Noah Harari summarizes this eloquently in his latest work Nexus:
In the late twentieth century, for example, intellectuals from the
radical left like Michel Foucault and Edward Said claimed that scientific
institutions like clinics and universities are not pursuing timeless and objective
truths but are instead using power to determine what counts as truth, in the
service of capitalist and colonialist elites. These radical critiques occasionally
went as far as arguing that “scientific facts” are nothing more than a capitalist
or colonialist “discourse” and that people in power can never be really
interested in truth and can never be trusted to recognize and correct their own
mistakes.The sky is also yellow, red, and purple in the mornings and evenings. It is also gray when there are storms, and black at night.
Covid kills people, but is it a lot? Or a little? Many things kill people, but I don’t get worried about lightning or sharks. Some people do. Relative to those, how dangerous is it?
Coal emits co2, but why should I care?
Why should someone listen to a journalist instead of to a random guy on social media, if neither of them is striving to be impartial and reliable?
The alternative is that people decide the other side is "false news" and now everyone drifts into polarised bubbles.
It would not be impartial to let them lie in an effort to get to the truth. You would have to correct them, at which point someone is going to call you partial. Journalism is about actively finding the truth, but you can see in this thread, people's idea of impartiality is letting everyone talk and shrugging.