How does viewership/readership determine the way a journalist reports his or her story?

Mohammed el-Nawawy

Mohammed el-Nawawy’s Response: Each media outlet, be it a television network, a radio station, a newspaper, or a magazine, tries to present the news in a way and from an angle that would be appealing to its audience. This means that each journalist working on a story has his/her audience in mind and shapes the story accordingly. Because reporters tailor their stories according to their audiences’ needs, it is almost impossible to satisfy everybody as to the impartiality of reporting. A story that seems impartial to one person might seem biased to another person. Generally, media outlets are faced with the perpetual tension and the hybrid struggle between attaining objectivity in news coverage while appealing to their audiences. This raises a critical question: How do media outlets strike the balance that provides audiences with a true representation of real events while still appealing to public sensibilities? Striking this balance is what I call contextual objectivity: Having a perspective while covering all sides to the story. There is nothing wrong with having a perspective as long as it does not deter the media outlet from covering other sides to the story.

Having said that, I think that in processing what they get from the media, the onus falls on the audiences to use a critical eye and to be aware of the different factors influencing and biasing the media. In the meantime, reporters have to be self-critical and have to hold themselves accountable for any biased or incomplete reporting.

Marda Dunsky

Marda Dunsky’s Response: Traditional news values include impact, proximity, and audience. Certainly not every story has an angle that can be explained in terms of “How will this affect me?” or “What is the news I can use here?” However, journalists often will try to find a local angle and/or to explain how a particular story or event will hold impact or interest for its audience. That’s why a story about changing abortion mores and laws in Poland, for example, will get much bigger play in Chicago — which has the largest Polish community outside of Warsaw and a large Catholic population — than it will get in other locales. Local TV stations sent reporters to Iraq to report on how troops from the hometown, state, and region were faring during the war, not the course of the war per se.

In a broader sense, much U.S. mainstream media coverage during the Iraq war relied primarily on official sources. It conveyed a sense of tension when the war, in its initial stages, seem not to be going well for the Americans and the British. When U.S. troops took Baghdad, there started to emerge via many mainstream outlets a sense of triumphalism. This has to do as much with the mood and expectations of the American public as it does anything else. American journalism has longstanding and well-established professional traditions, and it regards objectivity as a hallmark of good reporting. Nevertheless when it comes to international stories that involve American foreign policy, interests, and warmaking, much mainstream coverage is reported from a distinctly American point of view. This is quite natural, but it should be acknowledged and taken into account when coverage is analyzed.

Joan Konner

Joan Konner’s Response: A responsible, mainstream journalist who works in an organization, TV or print, takes the following audiences into account: his or her employer, i.e. the publisher or broadcaster; the reading or viewing audience; and finally, him- or herself, as a matter of integrity. A journalist s job is to report the facts and pursue the truth, but selectivity, taste and values are inevitably part of the process. Judgments have to be made all the time. The responsible journalist wishes to gain the trust of an audience, and he and she does this by reporting accurately and by respecting the values as well as the intelligence of the audience.

The journalist independent of a large organization may use his or her own judgment, but he or she also seeks to attract an audience as well as find an outlet for the work. Standards of online journalism are more flexible, and, perhaps, individual, but then, the independent journalist, who disregards audience taste and values, may discover he or she has no audience.