In September, I introduced Tra i Leoni’s academic year with some words that veteran CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour pronounced in front of me at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival, last summer. I quote those words here again: “The role of a journalist is to tell the truth, and the truth is not taking all sides and creating a false equivalence, either morally or factually. The truth is to understand and tell what is happening.”
It seemed – and still seems – a message that appropriately encapsulates the essence of journalism as I somewhat idealistically conceptualize it. A good reporter manages to emotionally detach themselves from the subject they are writing about and present the facts. A good reporter is thorough in research and balanced in dissemination. A good reporter does not need to explicitly appeal to the public’s impulses and opinions while presenting the facts because the facts they present are sufficient to provoke an emotional reaction if appropriate.
Other forms of journalism (interviews, opinion pieces, documentaries, editorials, commentaries, including the ones I weekly present in this column) are often very useful, well-researched, and appealing, but they transcend the purest form of reporting that is at the essence of journalism.
Of course, this is an outdated and by now old-fashioned definition of the term, as journalists are today merely one of the sources of information that we rely on to understand what is happening around us: there are hundreds of thousands of influencers and social media pages who conduct an activity that includes news gathering and news sharing.
Like most things, such an inexorable process can have both pros and cons. On one side, having a wider availability of sources of information in theory implies higher competition between news providers, which according to simple market theory should imply a higher quality of news. The problem with such an argument, of course, is that it relies on the assumption that what the public wants is high-quality news, while based on the content that goes viral the public is keener on being entertained rather than informed.
On the other side, if newspapers and journalists need to compete with influencers just to make a living and break even, they adopt some of their techniques, which in turn means that their focus shifts from the substance to the form because.
The million-dollar question is, as usual, what should we do? Is there a way to ensure an economically sustainable model of news sharing that operates by the spirit of good reporting advocated for by Christiane Amanpour? No clear answer exists, of course, and even if it did exist, implementing it quickly would be next to impossible.
An interesting insight on this question that I encountered this week, though, comes from Japan. In “Tokyo Vice” – an impressive twelve-year chronicle that an American journalist spent working in the crime division of the prestigious Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun – reporter Jake Adelstein describes the system Japanese major newspapers used to hire journalists in the 1990s, which has since been somewhat amended but maintains the essence.
“In Japan, people don’t build a career at the major newspapers by working their way up through local small-town newspapers. The papers hire the bulk of their reporters straight out of university, but first the clubs have to pass a standardized entrance exam, a kind of newspaper SAT. The ritual goes like this: Aspiring reporters report to a giant auditorium and sit for daylong tests. If your score is high enough, you get an interview, and then another, and then another. If you do well enough in your interviews, and if your interviewer like you, then you might get a job promise.”
The employment they are offered, much like in the case of many public administrations and civil service, is lifelong: you change division and work your way up within the corporation, but you can be fired only in a very limited set of circumstances if your conduct is problematic.
Of course, it is a model with countless potential flaws, and it would be crazy to think it feasible today, but maybe seeing how things work in the model that is arguably the exact opposite compared to ours is a starting point for theorizing an appropriate solution. And maybe making journalism merit-based rather than form-based is not such a bad idea if our concern is truly the quality of the information we consume every day.
Raised in Rome by Bosnian parents, I try to use writing as a tool to decipher the world around me and all its complexities by taking different perspectives into consideration. In Bocconi, I am studying Politics and Policy Analysis.
