Elements+of+Journalism,+Chapter+04


 * Kovach's //Elements of Journalism,// Chapter 04: Journalism of Verification **
 * Summary **

In the fourth chapter of Kovach’s book // Elements of Journalism // he describes the importance of checking facts and verifying the story. Kovach states that every journalist has a different method of fact checking “such as seeking multiple witnesses to an event, disclosing as much as possible about sources, and asking many sides for comment” (79). The author says that this fact checking discipline is what separates journalism from its counterpart entertainment (and “infotainment”). At the end of the 90’s a movie came out, // The Insider //, and caused outrage among journalists, especially Mike Wallace from // 60 Minutes // who took a direct hit from the movie and claimed that it “put words in his mouth”. The director of the movie claimed they may have embellished the story to add a more dramatic plot but that the movie was actually quite accurate to what was really happening. Wallace and the director didn’t understand each other because they were from two different worlds and didn’t “speak the same language.”

The concept of objectivity as pertaining to journalism has now been lost according to Kovach. When the idea of objectivity first came up in journalism it was because everyone knew that journalists (and all other professionals) have biases and they wanted a more “consistent method of testing information […] precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work” (81-82). Journalists then began to move towards what they called realism where they would bring out the facts and give the most important ones first and then go down to the least important (inverted pyramid) but skeptics, including Walter Lippmann, saw that the journalists weren’t presenting just the facts, but were presenting what “men wished to see” (82). Lippmann suggested that a more scientific stand should be taken in journalism and that the schools training men and women in the trade of journalism should focus on “evidence and verification” (83). Many journalists claim to have a neutral voice in their writings but as Kovach points out this can be misleading because a journalist might pick and choose what they write about but then give it a neutral voice to mislead us. Lippmann stated that it was the gathering of information that was most important and not the way that it was presented, facts are still facts and testimonies are still testimonies. Lippmann’s words about objectivity were lost among journalists however and many twisted what he said to mean very different things. They changed it to mean that objectivity should be the aim of the writing but not the method by which information is gathered, where Lippmann meant the opposite.

Kovach explains that the internet and other devices have made journalism more complicated and more likely to report falsely without even knowing it. He gives the example of Al Gore when he was misquoted and then everyone else began to use this quote, even though Gore had never said that. The // Washington //Post was the first to misquote the president and then The Republican Party during a press release and the // New York //also followed suit and misquoted the presidential candidate. This is why it is so important for journalists to check the facts and verify their validity before printing the information for the public.

Kovach tells us that fairness in journalism is being fair to the citizens reading and watching the news, not being fair to sources and giving them all equal weight. Fairness is giving the public an understanding of the facts, not making all the sources happy by including them in the report.

Kovach gives a list of rules that “are the intellectual principles of a science of reporting:” (89)
 * 1) Never add anything that was not there.
 * 2) Never deceive the audience.
 * 3) Be as transparent as possible about your methods and motives.
 * 4) Rely on your own original reporting.
 * 5) Exercise humility.

I’ve done a lot of summaries for the readings assigned, so here is half of Chapter 4 and I’m leaving it up to someone else to define what each of these rules mean!