Media are your enemies? Far from it

The first thing I did on my first day at the Sonora Union Democrat was make the fire calls. It was the summer of 1969 and I was interning between my junior and senior years in college. Great summer, the best summer of my youth, although those first-day fire calls were an inauspicious start. I didn't have a clue.

There were only a half dozen or so fire departments in Tuolumne County and that day there were only a couple grass fires and one or two traffic accidents. Not a daunting task for a real reporter. It took me all morning to make the calls and serve up a few paragraphs of poorly written, information-deficient prose. I knew Harvey C. McGee, editor and publisher, was knitting his brow in his corner office.

But McGee was patient, and the next day I had my Curtis MacDougall reporting text opened to the page listing the basic elements of the fire story. You know, things like where it happened, when it happened, what happened, if there were injuries, the damage, the cause, the fire units dispatched, how long where firefighters on the scene and so on.

It still took me all morning, but the end product was better — and each day my work got better still. Practice doesn't always make perfect, but usually it at least makes for a better result. One afternoon covering a small forest fire just outside Sonora I got knocked over by fire retardant dropped by a CDF aircraft when I failed to notice the firefighters, who knew the drop was coming, had scampered off the hill. A reporter's learning curve can be steep.

By summer's end, I'd covered a variety of stories: Boise Cascade literally painting a town to pretty it up for buyers at its nearby development; university archeologists scrambling to recover artifacts in an area that would be inundated a few years later by the New Melones Lake; the final work on the new Columbia College campus. Also in my notebooks: cops; traffic accidents; countless planning commission, school board, county supervisors and city council meetings.

McGee made sure I earned my $100 a week, and I knew better than to even think about asking for overtime. The money didn't matter. I would have done it for free. It didn't bother me at all to live in a $60 a month dump with walls so thin that when the neighbor brought a lady friend home, ah ....well, you understand. That summer I lived off Cheerios, PB&J, fried cube steaks and Coke. I was in heaven.

Just as my J-school professors had promised, I learned more about reporting that summer than from all the textbooks and journalism classes I ever took. If you want to know how to report and write, you've got to report and write. And then do it over and over and over again.

I did it over and over again for more than four decades, some days better than others. I doubt there was a day I didn't learn something about writing, editing and gathering information — but especially about the subjects I covered. You just don't walk into a county supervisors meeting and know how to cover county government. It takes time, practice and lots of questions. It also takes making mistakes. In reporting, like with most things in life, it's your mistakes, not your successes, that teach.

When reporters make mistakes, they are in public and usually with a byline atop the offending copy. That kind of potential public embarrassment tends to focus the mind. It's no fun to take reader calls when you screw up. I've taken more than my share, but not once was it because of a purposeful mistake. I never met a reporter who went to work with the idea of screwing up a story.

And that brings me to my point: most of the public hasn't a clue how the media operate. Oh, there's a vague recognition of the First Amendment, press, speech and religious freedom and such. But too often the acceptance of those freedoms is only generously applied when they line up with one's biases.

It's bothered me for years that the general education component of a college degree only rarely requires any media studies. When you consider how much of what we know about the world comes to us through the media, it is frightening how little people generally know about the various channels of communications.

People, the saying goes, are born with only two talents, to practice medicine and to edit the newspaper. Call me an elitist, but I don't want some schmuck off the streets doing my knee replacement surgery. And 40-plus years of hanging around newspapers tells me not everybody is equipped by knowledge, skills or temperament to gather and report the news.

That's the reality. It's not fake news about news. And here's another reality: just as no doctor worthy of being called doc shows up at the clinic hoping to get a patient's diagnosis wrong, no reporter worth a damn slides in front of a computer and tries to write a story full of errors or bias.

Do doctors sometimes misdiagnose and reporters sometimes get it wrong? Yep. Everybody has bad days. Human physiology and human events are complex beasts. This is not to excuse errors but to explain them.
From time to time when I'd give a talk to a service club, as an experiment I'd ask members of the audience to write a one- or two-sentence description of me. Not once did I have any two descriptions come out the same. I used it as a way of illustrating how we all see the world differently.

Mine was a pretty low-stakes game with my audiences. When you start talking about coverage of the City Council or the White House, the stakes are considerably higher. This is the argument for not — not ever — relying on just one information source, no matter how it might feed your viewpoint.

Good reporters don't rely on one source, or shouldn't, and anonymous sources should be last resorts, known to both reporter and editor. When you're reporting, you need to quickly figure out the biases of your sources so you can convey that information to readers.

I would humbly argue that reporters are trained as much as humanly possible to set aside their biases and report their subjects as fairly and accurately as they can. And strong, sometimes even multi-layered editing, adds another layer of protection.

Go into any newsroom and you'll hear arguments over the emphasis of one fact over another in a story. There are arguments about the relative importance of one story versus another. There are arguments about story play, as in front page above the fold or buried on Page 8.

But about one thing there is no argument: the press is not the enemy of the people. Ask the people of Flint, Michigan. Or Oroville. Or, for that matter, Stockton. To suggest otherwise is poppycock.

Contact Eric Grunder, former opinion page editor of The Record, at elgrunder@msn.com. Follow him at oncruisecontrolafter65.blogspot.com and on Twitter @elgrunder.

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