Reporting as a Genre of Writing
The distinction between reporting and editorializing is valid even in the Internet era
“American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.” Jay Rosen said these words in 2010, as part of his already yearslong campaign against the objective style of reporting. He directed his stern criticism at journalists, but audiences are not innocent of this vice. Just as reporters have longed to disappear from their own words, so too have readers longed to to be shown an unmediated reality.
Some critics, far less sympathetic to journalists than Jay Rosen, have argued that the distinction between reporting and editorializing cannot be maintained. If you are going to make an argument then you ought to make it candidly, out in the open. The very idea of just reporting on events is a relic of a bygone era, a brief moment in the history of media. So this line of argument runs.
We absolutely cannot fulfill the lust of which Rosen speaks. Reporters always report from a perspective, and readers have perspectives of their own, coloring the manner in which they read. Media will always provide something mediated, and will fail to provide direct access to unvarnished truth.
But we should not underestimate the range of what words can do for readers, nor actively seek to narrow it. Words can certainly communicate and inform, but they can also delight, and intrigue, and enrage. They can breathe life into the defeated and they can seduce the capable into complacency. Here we put a few words together tersely, devising a poem that strings the readers along line by line. There we spin a yarn, slowly walking our reader through a world so that they might understand the story set within it.
And we can make a direct argument, make a straightforward case for some notion, as editorials do. But sometimes what readers want is to be given what someone else considers the salient facts of the matter, and that is precisely what reporters provide. There are many domains of life, outside of the media business, where a succinct update is more valuable than a detailed unpacking of assumptions would be. Even the columnist leaves more about their perspective unsaid than said. Some reporters may be more honest, more deserving of our respect, than others, but there is nothing categorically wrong with reporting.
Reporting, as a genre of writing, is rarely beautiful but far from objectionable. It serves a valuable purpose and is therefore unlikely to follow 20th century print and broadcast models to their graves. Nor should it; there is much to appreciate in this austere and undemanding style, if little to love.