One of the conversations on the sidelines of a recent interaction with college students in Chennai was about reporting, and how to filter out the noise and focus on the facts when reading a news story. You can demonstrate the point with almost any story from the mainstream press; here is a benign instance relating to the just completed Nanded municipal elections:
In a significant morale-booster ahead of the crucial assembly polls in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, the Congress Thursday swept the municipal polls in Maharashtra’s Nanded, defeatingthe rulingBJP in a keenly contested battle.While the Congress has been in power in the civic body for nearly two decades now, and Nanded had remained loyal to the Congress even during the 2014 Lok Sabha and assembly polls, the shot in the arm for the party came from the magnitude of Thursday’s win.
See the portions that have been struck out — none of that is “news”, and has no business in the lede. For instance, that the result is a “significant morale booster” ahead of upcoming elections in Gujarat and HP is over-reach: there is no connection, however tenuous, between municipal elections in a Maharashtra district and assembly elections in other states. The last sentence is spin (Nanded has historically been a Congress base; why therefore is a win there a “shot in the arm”?), and again, it is out of place in a news story, particularly upfront. Rewritten, a fact-based news lead would be something like this:
The Congress party won 73 out of 81 seats in the Nanded-Waghala municipal corporation elections, results for which were announced Thursday.
The Congress, which has held power in the civic body for close to 20 years, improved its tally from 41 in the outgoing corporation; the BJP, which came second, raised its tally from two to six. The Congress win came at the expense of Sharad Pawar’s NCP which, contesting independently, failed to win a single seat and of the Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM, which held 11 seats in the outgoing corporation and failed to win a single seat this time. The Shiv Sena with a solitary seat, down from 12 in the previous polls, was another major loser.
That’s it. That is your fact-based news lead — and that is all it should be. Succeeding grafs could provide some background on the major tropes: The erosion of Muslim votes for AIMIM in minority-dominated constituencies; the backing by sections of the Sena to the BJP; the BJP engineering defections in both Congress and Sena in the lead-up to the elections and all those candidates losing their seats; the BJP’s flat out campaign, with close to a dozen members of the Fadnavis cabinet being pressed into election duties. Then can come quotes from the winning and losing sides giving their read of the results, and the possible implications.
The point is, we talk a lot about ‘biased’ news stories. The average reader may not parse stories like an editor would, but he feels an instinctive sense of discomfort at any sign that a reporter is mixing fact with opinion and thereby spinning the story — as, for instance, when the reporter reaches for a wider significance in a purely local election. Repeated instances of this have a cumulative effect on the mind of the reader and lead to his conclusion that the ‘news’ is biased.
That’s the exercise I suggested to those kids: take the newspaper and a red pencil; as you read, strike out from news stories anything that is not factual — adjectives and adjectival phrases, opinion, etc. Then try rearranging the grafs into a cascading sequence of fact; if some form of opinion is deemed necessary, segregate it from the facts, place it lower down in the copy, and clearly flag it as opinion. I asked the
I asked the handful of students who were interested in this particular discussion to try the exercise and email me their results. Here’s the interesting bit: I picked this story for the demo because one of those students, Megha, sent me an email this morning with the line: “This story seems to be an illustration of what you were talking about that day. Am I reading it right when I think this is not how to do a news story?”
I see this all the time. Young wannabe journalists, as yet untainted by time spent in newsrooms, seem to instinctively grasp the mechanics of reporting. It is one good reason why sharp newsrooms need to invest in young minds, leave them on a loose rein, and mentor them with a light touch when needed.
Megha, this one is for you.
PS: Here is your face/palm moment for today. A couple of clips:
“I’ve known the family since 1987. Amit Shah is a typical Indian family man and whenever I’d meet him, his wife Sonal and Jay were always around. They are inseparable,” a source told The Quint on the condition of anonymity.
WTF?! In the best traditions of investigative reporting, it takes an “anonymous source” to says that Amit Shah is a family man?! I mean, how do you even write such absolute tripe with a straight face?
Jay visits his father in New Delhi now and then and brings with him Gujarati delicacies. “He brings his parents khakra and mangoes every now and then, but Shah senior doesn’t let him stay in Delhi for long… Jay takes interest in his father’s political activities and is always looking out for him.”
*sigh*
And then we wonder why the media is losing every vestige of credibility.
