NRJ Books: The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect

Abstract

The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect By Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (New York Crown Publishers, 2001), 205 pages This book's jacket shamelessly bills it as of the most important ever written about news, but if thousands of journalists read it and change their attitudes and behavior accordingly, that may well be true. Kovach, the well-known former editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, former curator of Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and former Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, has worked together again with Tom Rosenstiel, late of the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek, to produce their second book for and through the Project for Excellence in Journalism and its Committee of Concerned Journalists. For the record, this reviewer is a member of the Committee but has received no funding from the project. In a highly readable style, with a sharp eye for the anecdote, with which they start nearly every chapter, Kovach and Rosenstiel posit and then support-- through a combination of facts, logical arguments and appeals to concepts such as professionalism and democracy-one major point in each chapter. Each of those major points will be familiar to most readers. Yet not all of the details will be, and together the major points and details are highly persuasive-especially when one knows that Kovach and Rosenstiel have distilled several years' worth of hundreds of formal interviews and comments in public forums, many from the country's best journalists. Their nine major points are: * Journalism's first obligation is to the truth. * Its first loyalty is to citizens. * Its essence is a discipline of verification. * Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover. * It must serve as an independent monitor of power. * It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise. * It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. * It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional. * Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience. There surely is nothing controversial in those statements, unless one believes-with respect to the ninth point-that journalists shouldbe professional automatons only. But some aspects of how Kovach and Rosenstiel propose journalists reach those nine goals, and what they knowingly left off that list (fairness and balance, among other usual points), may raise a few eyebrows-- although not this reviewer's. Kovach and Rosenstiel, like Jack Fuller, Loren Ghiglione, Gene Roberts and many others, argue that journalists need to develop sources, ask questions, organize and interpret information and provide analysis that the public can't do for itself. This means that journalists need to be more highly educated, better trained and more specialized than ever-the journalist as both expert and thinker / analyst. Journalists must choose the best sources, not the most interesting or the most available, while broadening coverage to what concerns the public, not what only concerns elite sources-such as tactics in presidential campaigns. Imagine the Family Research Council and others of its ilk being quoted only on matters on which they have true expertise-which would mean never. Kovach and Rosenstiel argue that the public wants the truth-not just free speech or commerce and certainly not only mere facts. They urge journalists to ask good questions, not simply ask bad questions loudly or persistently. They are deeply concerned, like Thomas Kunkel and Rem Rieder at American Journalism Review (and this reviewer), about the fact that much American journalism is simply boring even when the news isn't. And Kovach and Rosenstiel provide plenty of evidence for how and why, if much print journalism is dull, most broadcast journalism doesn't even warrant that name. …