Come on, journalists, let's do better...
You will not be surprised to know that as a journalist, I believe that words matter (crowd gasps). Since tomorrow is my first day as a freelance journalist, I really should spend this newsletter self-promoing and telling you all to hire me as a freelancer (which you should, btw, I'm pretty good at this... carlasertin.com ), but I really want to draw attention to the way that we phrase things and the importance of our words as purveyors of information.
This was actually a BIG part of my interview with Hasan Piker -- that he feels he helps his audience parse through media and understand the meaning between the lines. When you write "Powerful explosion rocks Beirut overnight", you are implying neutrality. No one caused the explosion, it wasn't targeting anyone or anything, it just happened -- as though to say, "Rain falls in Beirut overnight." But that's not quite the case, is it?
As media, we exist in the world of context -- to operate in this profession, this calling, this duty, is to contextualize, inform and explain current events to the rest of the world.
This doesn't mean that every headline is written with ill-intent and some nefarious agenda; journalists are people and we mess up sometimes, too. But those mistakes have consequences, both for our readers and for our own credibility and that of our publication.
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This is more of a note of frustration than anything else, but I guess also a word out to young journalists that the way you phrase things radically changes the narrative, so make sure that you're sending the right message. When you center "Palestinians evacuating" in a headline about Israeli soldiers allegedly shooting evacuating Palestinians, you're completely undermining the message.
This newsletter is also a note to other readers who, like myself, might feel frustrated with the way they've watched the war coverage -- you're not crazy. I don't have much more to say about it right now.
The tone of my newsletter will shift as GITEX falls upon us next week, but just felt I had to share this as it's been eating at me lately.
More later!
Journalist, Digital Producer, Multimedia Specialist
1 个月Well said. One reason I suspect that this is bias and conscious censorship is that the passive and weak phrasing and the one-sided angling of the stories goes against everything you and I were taught to do in journalism school. And this is being done by outlets that were held up to us as gold standards of writing and reporting. It's not as if their writers and editors don't understand basic journalistic rules.