When Reporting Gets a Little Out of Hand...

Kaitlyn Marshall
km934711@ohio.edu

Ever hear the expression that children are supposed to be seen and not heard? Well in a sense that ideal can be applied to journalists. Now hear me out, while we may need to be heard for sure there comes a time when we need to dial back our involvement for the sake of the story, the public, and even ourselves.

Keeping the attention on the story

At times it can be difficult to make sure that we aren't the center of any story. In Ferguson this did become the case for a while with journalists who were supposed to be reporting the news suddenly becoming the targets of arrests and agression. News media seemed to only care about how our rights as journalists were being encroached upon while thousands of others who were protesting were having their rights violated as well, and in much larger numbers. It seemed as though the news media wanted to focus on their own before they started to worry about the protestors who were being killed in the streets.

This isn't the only case however when a journalist has become the story rather than reporting the facts that they have. This past summer a reporter in West Virginia named Annie Moore reported that she had been shot at while recording a stand up. The national headline then wasn't about the murder she was covering. It was all about her and what her experience was now that she had a so-called “brush with death”. Only to find out later that the “gunshots” Moore heard were actually the sounds of a backfiring truck with the owner even coming out and saying that his truck backfires all the time and it does sound similar to gunshots.

When stories like this are run with the journalists at the forefront, if anything is false we immediately lose all of the credibility that we have worked to gain and to maintain. We are suddenly looked as at sensationalist, instead of presenting news, and being more focused on our own rather than the people we are supposed to be keeping informed. We spend so much time building up our credibility to only have it slashed with one bad story about a journalist that it takes us down by so many pegs.

But let's keep this all in perspective

As journalists we do have a duty to inform the public, and in some cases that means traveling to high-risk zones whether they be foreign or domestic. In a USA Today article, Rem Rieder asks why journalists risk their lives in hot zones such as Syria or Iraq when they know that they could be potentially killed. We have to go back to our core values here as journalists at all times and remember that the story isn't about us. There is always something more happening and we have a job to find out what it is. Take the attention off of us and put it where it really matters. We signed up for this job, other people didn’t sign up for what may be happening to them.

So just remember journalists and future journalists: