Category archives: Journalism

Argument by empathy: Popular in journalism?

David Herrera,

The question that interests me in my argumentation research as it relates to journalism is: Is what journalists write persuasive?

A separate but related question is: How do journalists attempt to persuade us? This question, I am sure, has lots of good literature, formal and informal, addressing it. The very small sample I know of would probably say journalists use anecdotes, or remind us that “I’m there, you’re not,” or promote their “objectivity” as a means of claiming authority. But I can claim no expertise on the topic.

I can speculate, though. Lately, I would predict that the “how” is heavy on the use of empathy.

The ‘Received Theory of Reasoning’

I thought about empathy recently after reading “Attitudes to Reasoning” by Thomas J. Richards. Richards was interested in developing curricula for teaching logic in school, but most of his effort in this paper went to outlining what he saw as prevailing attitudes toward logic in society.

Briefly, these attitudes are:

  1. Beliefs cannot be criticized on logical grounds. Any attempt to do so is met with responses like, “well, you’re entitled to your opinion” such that debate halts. Instead, the right to hold an opinion is such that any attempt to attack the truth of one’s belief is tantamount to attacking one’s right to hold the belief at all.

  2. The Genetic Fallacy is rejected as a fallacy at all because if opinions cannot be true or false, the only way to come up with reasons for why someone believes them is to look at their causes. So the acceptable use of “well he’s an X so of course he believes that” increases.

  3. Because reasons for beliefs are out and origins for them are in, the only way to persuade people of something is to get them to empathize with you. If they empathize with you, they can see how great the “causal state” is from which your opinions developed.

Journalism and the ‘Received Theory’

Now, to try to relate Richards’s argument to journalism. First, does (1) strike anybody else as a belief manifesting itself in traditional “objective,” both-sides journalism?

In both-sides journalism, both sides are “entitled to their opinion” and debate halts. Reporters do not criticize anybody themselves, but instead filter their criticisms through the opinions of sources — who are of course equally entitled to them.

If journalists follow (1), they might well also follow (2) and reject the genetic fallacy. I’ll be honest. I don’t know whether this one is true.

So let me conveniently skip to (3). If journalists abide by (1) and (2) then we might be able to assume they also follow (3) in their work: If empathy is the only way in which one can change their mind, then we should find that journalists lay on the empathy in their stories. They would view empathy as the only means of persuasion.

How might empathy manifest itself? One idea is the way in which profiles of individuals focus more on how that person came to think what they think rather than why or whether the person is correct.

Another place to look for empathy as persuasion is political journalism. David Broder might have been alluding to the idea in his book Behind the Front Page. Broder defends horse-race journalism on grounds that voters vote based not on “philosophies” but on “individuals.” “Voters use issues to weigh the capabilities of the candidates and to refine their own feelings about the candidates’ personality and character … In some campaigns issues are of no real importance.”

Wrapping up with two questions:

  • Is Richards’s appraisal accurate? It is, after all, decades old.

  • When is it acceptable for empathy to be journalists’ main route of persuasion?

Breaking news online: on the hunt for best practices for journalists

David Herrera,

This semester I’m working as a copy editor at the Columbia Missourian. I’m also assigned to a research project: Find the best ways that websites handle breaking news, in terms of content and procedure.

By content I mean, what information is posted? When? In what form? And related questions.

By procedure I mean, who in the newsroom posts the information? Who edits it first? Who’s in charge? And so on.

As part of the project, I want to talk about these questions with journalists working with breaking news every day. If that sounds like you, I would appreciate your sparing some time for an interview in the next few weeks. If that sounds like someone you know, I would appreciate your pointing me to that person or asking that person to consider helping me out.

What I learn from the interviews and my other research will go into my report to the Missourian in December, as will some recommendations.

If you have questions, or if you’re interested in helping, please e-mail me, ping me on Twitter or just comment below.

Are journalists corporate spies?

David Herrera,

A thought experiment:

When journalists investigate private businesses for wrongdoing, or upcoming products, or rumors, etc., do they commit corporate espionage? By “corporate espionage” (or “industrial espionage”), I mean simply when one business attempts to obtain information about another business for competitive gain.

Journalists usually work for privately-held media. Learning about other companies helps journalists against their competition by spawning fresh, potentially exclusive, stories to go on their websites or into their newspapers.

  • Journalists could argue that they provide a public service.

    Probably, but:

    • That doesn’t necessarily cancel out their engaging in business-against-business intelligence work.

    • Couldn’t the businesses that journalists investigate also argue, under the dominant ideology in this country, that they provide a public service by offering goods in the marketplace? If so, do they contribute better public services than do journalists?

  • Journalists could argue that, if the corporation is clearly harming the public, then the journalist has a stronger moral claim to investigate them.

    But, journalists can’t know about the corporation’s harm until after their investigation. Their investigation could demonstrate that the reporter’s hunch was incorrect, in which case we would have to go back to whose public service was greater.

Does it matter whether journalists are considered corporate spies?

If journalists coordinated with law enforcement before investigating private businesses (given that we rely on the government to watch over business otherwise), thereby working on behalf of a public agency, would their work stop being corporate espionage? [1]

  1. E.g., the journalists in Dietemann v. Time, who coordinated with the Los Angeles District Attorney before investigating a quack doctor. ↩

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From SPJ’s unimaginative department

David Herrera,

In researching state shield laws recently I found that past presidents of the Society of Professional Journalists had written editorials about them.

I couldn’t resist the irony of journalists recycling old editorials into new ones. This is the stuff of bad PR reps, or at least so we were taught.

Here are the opening sentences of Irwin Gratz’s editorial. Gratz was SPJ president in 2004-05:

Regardless of whether you believe anonymous sources are overused or not, there’s little denying reporters sometime need to promise confidentiality. Some of the greatest investigative stories of our age have relied on them.

Now read the opening sentences to Christine Tatum’s editorial. Tatum was SPJ president in 2006-07:

Regardless of whether you think journalists use too many anonymous sources, it’s hard to argue that they don’t need to promise confidentiality sometimes. Many of the biggest investigative stories of our age have been based in part on information shared with a reporter by someone who wanted to keep his or her identity a secret.

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Future of context: Same as the past?

David Herrera,

I generally agree with the goals of Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, and Tristan Harris’s Future of Context project.

But at the same time, I don’t quite get it. Concern for context in journalism has been around since before the Hutchins Commission, which in 1947 wrote: “The media should provide a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning.”

So, what’s different today? The Web, obviously. It provides great opportunities for context and background.

But, then again, so do books, and they’re not new.

But, then then, the most oft-cited “explainer” I’m aware of is a radio program, This American Life’s “Giant Pool of Money” (which lived up to the hype).

I’m left with a couple of questions:

Does “context” mean something different now such that Web provides it better than “old” media could?

If explainers are so important to our understanding, why do we need newspapers? Even after we understand the context, what good is a daily report when a more infrequent summary could provide the same, while linking it to the context we’ve already absorbed or the context we don’t know yet? (As a commenter on PressThink notes, explainers are not simple.)

Has the meaning of “context” changed such that the time and effort normally considered required to understand an issue in context is no longer applies? If news organizations’ try to provide the news quickly and in easily-digestable forms, should we expect them to provide context?