Theory, science and practice

Ihad a conversation the other day in which I offered the opinion that the theory and science of journalism is not difficult. Anyone can grasp the concept: Gather information, assess it, present what’s been learned without fear or favor. (Then duck.)

You’re just the messenger, and this just is what has happened. What’s difficult is the execution. The practice of journalism is hard if one is trying to do it right.

That’s true whether you are working as a straight-up news reporter or in that shifty trade called “opinion journalism,” a term which could be taken as a near oxymoron considering the definition I’ve given above.

But we have to be grownups about these things, which means we have to be both realistic and nuanced and to take note of the fact that every story is filtered through a human consciousness, and all storytellers necessarily select details and make decisions about what stories they tell.

An opinion journalist is allowed to analyze and critique, to wonder aloud and even to guess about certain things. A reporter should try very hard not to do any of those, though they might report what other people — presumably in a position to know about things — are saying about what’s going on.

One way to think about it is that the reporter is a play-byplay announcer in a booth at a football game, while the opinion journalist is a color commentator. Both of them are — or should be — constrained by what has happened on the field.

It would be inappropriate for the play-by-play guy to describe a quarterback draw as an end around, but it would be OK for the color guy to suggest that maybe Dak Prescott should have gotten down a couple of seconds quicker or that maybe Kellen Moore shouldn’t have got so cute with the play call.

If you had to make do with only one of these streams of information, maybe you’d go with the play-by-play over the color, figuring you could make up your own stories about what kind of people the players and coaches are.

Or maybe you’d take the anecdotes and John Madden circling Gatorade coolers with his telestrator because you can see for yourself who passed it to whom. (Or maybe, like I sometimes do, you just like to sit there with the game muted and watch.)

But unless football is your full-time profession, you probably benefit from taking in both streams, even if you don’t always like what’s happening with your team on the field or what the talking heads are saying about it.

Deep down, you might admit that you enjoy disagreeing with a commentator who holds strong opinions. Howard Cosell built a career out of cognitive dissonance: Nobody could stand him, but everybody watched.

An opinion journalist has a kind of cover that a reporter doesn’t; she or he can always maintain that whatever crackpot notion they’ve thrown out for public consumption is their honest opinion. And so long as they’re basing it on facts, they’re playing fair.

That’s a slippery concept, especially in a time when it’s getting more and more difficult for us to arrive at a collective reservoir of accepted facts. There are always people who will say something is what it isn’t, who are willing to supply a convenient alternative theory of reality.

And there are always people willing to buy into these alternative notions of how things are because they find them psychologically satisfying.

Which is why the work done by straight-up news reporters is so important.

Sure, news reporters can go as wrong as opinion journalists. But usually they don’t have the luxury of lying to themselves about how badly they’ve broken. They see what is going on; they either do the right thing or they don’t. Reporters have to have strong characters; if they don’t, they will eventually be undone by the job.

This despite the stereotype — often promulgated by reporters — of their lot as cynical and curmudgeonly and even corruptible. My generation and those that came before it especially indulged this romantic nonsense, to the point that some of us kept bottles of Scotch in our desk drawers and looked down on the political.

The cult of H.L. Mencken was an unfortunate influence on American newsrooms; for all his stylistic brilliance Mencken was an unhappy, sour and ultimately dishonest writer who insisted cynicism was realism and that to believe in anything less tangible than the heft of a coin is to believe in fairies.

The Menckenist assumption is that everyone is working an angle and that truth is largely irrelevant and that all we call noble is either a good show or a sign of inherent and exploitable weakness.

I don’t believe that. People make mistakes and some people are corrupt, but not everyone is shoddy.

That said, we take notice of the fact that every story is filtered through a human consciousness, and all storytellers necessarily select details and make decisions about the kinds of stories they tell. Discretion is exercised, motives are withheld, and sources lie. Nothing is perfect; you do the best you can.

The world has long been crazy; it was in the 1960s that Philip Roth proclaimed “the self-satirizing genius of modern life outstrips the powers of the novelist to satirize it.” That was back when there was a Walter Cronkite, when our media was more a kind of cultural glue than a matrix of insulated sects. There were conspiracy theorists then too, and dark lies and bigotry and fear like cancer in the hearts of the thwarted.

The precepts of journalism are not hard to understand.

You go out. You see things. You talk to people. You take notes. You come back to the office and you type, or write in longhand, what you found out. It’s not brain surgery, it’s not carpentry, it’s not even pizza delivery. It’s the kind of profession people fall into, or fall back on.

It’s also a calling. And it is hard to do it right.