Situational definition:
On Wednesday night in Schwab Auditorium, John Eligon was invited to speak at the Foster-Foreman Conference of Distinguished Writers. He is a national correspondent for The New York Times and he covered a lot of events on issues involving race problems. Eligon mentioned in his lecture that there is no need to put journalists’ own voices, opinions, and perspectives in their articles, let the readers interpret the articles themselves. Journalists need to report stories unbiased.
Analysis:
At first, Eligon introduced one of his experiences on reporting one story. Him, as a national correspondent, went from door to door, holding his notebook, asking questions in the neighborhood, and the polices came, asking for his ID because he was being reported as a suspicious person. It is important to let people contextualize the story and the situation, instead of making it all about the journalist him/herself. In his speech, he stated that it is different to put your own voices in the report as just write about what happened at that moment. Journalists need to know that it is reasonable to write about your own opinion and it definitely is very hard to not have an opinion since we are all human and most of the times, stories reported are linked with daily lives and personal experiences, but it is better for journalists to not including their perspectives in reports, and just let the stories do it for you.
Another message we can learn from Eligon’s lecture is to get out of your comfort zone when doing reporting and interviews. He made an example by telling one of his stories on the Neo-Nazi festival in Germany. He went out of his comfort zone and interviewed people in the festival, in order to get fascinating and detailed stories. “The police, as is customary, briefly escorted reporters around the festival. Walking around, I felt like a zoo animal. All eyes on me. Smirks, whispers and gawks through cellphone cameras.” (Eligon, 2018). Eligon faced a lot of race problems in his career, “Stephan, 37, later told me that he thought negatively of black people. ‘Whenever someone says to me, ‘You are racist,’ I say, ‘Yeah, I am racist,’ ‘he said. “Do I have something against black people? At the moment, yes, I have to unfortunately say, even though you are black.’ (Eligon, 2018). According to an article about racial problems in journalism, “As Entman and Rojecki (2000) suggest, racial representation in news is related to the ideological nature of news itself, the ways in which certain ideas and images (and not others) emerge in consistent ways across media and over time and therefore come to “make sense.” (Stiles, S., & Kitch, C, 2011).
Conclusion:
In my opinion, both topics mentioned are important and overwhelming, in today’s media situation, journalists should be aware of how important it is for readers to contextualize reports and get out of their comfort zone.
Work Cited:
- Eligon, J. (2018). Face paint, balloons and ‘White power’: German neo-nazis put on a pretty face.
- Stiles, S., & Kitch, C. (2011). “Redemption for Our Anguished Racial History”: Race and the National Narrative in Commemorative Journalism About Barack Obama. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35(2), 115–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859911404604