Brian_11_I

This is going to be one of those long posts...skip it, I suggest. It has almost nothing to do with the Simmons chapter other than the world 'objectivity'. Perhaps there will be a point near the end but that's unlikely.

I've been trained for many years as a journalist and (much to the surprise of folks like Liz) individually we all strive for objectivity. It's not until you introduce power structures like heavy-handed advertisers and high-level political influence do we begin to see biases. At the micro level, most journalist are objective and don't allow their personal opinions to interfere with non-editorial content. I could rant for hours at the absurdity of 'liberal media' - but buy me a beer or four and I'll take you on all night.

That being said, Simmons is begging us through this chapter to get away from objectivity and process. Unfortunately, that's been pounded into my head for years. Furthermore, I want to fight for quality objective journalism sans any corporate or political involvement (that includes sponsorship - looking at you Jim Lehrer) for the rest of my life. It makes me so damn sick to look at university newspapers with sissy-ass faculty advisers too afraid of the deans/president coming down on them for allowing their students to fight for a good story and learn from the process. College papers are one of the few entities in the world that should support journalism over anything else. There are no power structures that should stand in their way and advertisers in this setting should go kick rocks. We are the most sought after group to marketers so college journalist should not be afraid to do a story that disenfranchise their advertisers - there are plenty more where that came from.

Here is a personal story that I'm damn proud of. Many of you know I was General Manager at TV2 back at Kent State. Our station did two LIVE newscasts daily - most of which looked like your typical local-market news. Now most of our field reporters were crappy; story titles like "drinking causes bad grades" were aired nightly. There wasn't much I could do as the GM as the news division rested with our News Director (whom I tried to get fired at least 3 times but 'by laws' said I couldn't).

So it's near the end of the school year and my mentor and now ex-professor, Karl Idsvoog, comes bursting into my office to tell me about a story his student picked up. This guy was an investigative journalist for 20 years and also ran his own first-amendment think tank before coming back to academia so you know right where his heart is. Turns out his student found a story about the provost of our university hiring one of his family members to a non-posted, high-profile job. It was literally the biggest story to come across my desk in my tenure at TV2 News. Plus the Daily Kent Stater (newspaper) hadn't even caught the smell of a story let alone doing the leg work so it was ours!

I give the story the green light, load it into the playback server, and wait for 5:30 to roll around. I even bumped the majority of the A block so that this story could get the most prominence.

About an hour after meeting with Karl, our crappy news director strolls in and starts going over the rundown. He sees the story and pulls it. Turns out another professor, a jack-off with tenure and a bad haircut, got smacked around by the Dean upon hearing of the story and told the news director to pull it. Now let me explain why this kid sucked so bad...apparently he has no idea or passion for news, he just happened to get hired by a faculty board who was too dumb to realize this individual was a waste of sperm and eggs. So ignoring the fact that it was a breaking story, we had NO OBLIGATION to suck-up to administration, and it was the most unique publishing environment he'll ever work in...it gets pulled.

I get quietly enraged. The student that produced the package comes to me obviously upset that his best work of his life will never make it to air and I tell him, "I'm sorry, he's news director". This whole time I had no intention of letting this jack-off ruin my newscast. Aside from being GM, I was also the Friday director and it just happened to be my day.

About 10 minutes before the newscast, shortly after the news director had left for the day, I reloaded the package and my old rundown and sent it to the producers. They were ignorant and just followed my instructions. 5:30 rolls around, "and in 3, 2, 1..." - it's on the air. Within the first minute of the package my switchboard lights up. The Assistant Producer is yelling across the control room, apparently that crappy professor was on the phone sceaming. I tell her to transfer the call to me and I pick up the phone and put it back on the hook. Then I just leave the lines open and wait for the package to finish.

People in the newsroom and the control room are all frozen once we get to break and I go into the studio and tell them to get ready to see some administrators and to just stick to script and to let me handle everything. Sure enough by the middle of the C block, the professor who pulled the package is looking through the window along with my crappy news director. I politely inform them of their titles along with mine, 'you would be the faculty adviser and my by-laws say you have no editorial control what-so-ever', 'you are a news director, I am a general manager, I trump you...don't come back to this newsroom till next week'. Obviously they weren't going to give up so, catching wind of the controversy occurring during a live newscast, Karl (the good professor) gets the media lawyer in a full sprint to our building. The lawyer comes in, says that the professor was stifling my first-amendment rights and insisted that he leave the room. He does and things calm down and the rest of the newscast goes on without a hitch.

Then the 6:30 newscast comes along and all of a sudden my rundown is out of ENPS and my teleprompters aren't working. "Wow, just wow" I think to myself and inform our talent that tonight they'll be reading their printed scripts for the A block (which they did better than anyone I've ever seen in a flighty situation like that). We go to air, the story airs, and again I'm getting phone calls. I just ignore them.

Ok, so this great story goes to air, whoever saw it saw it. I felt that, as a journalist, it was my duty to inform the public of this happening on campus before some PR bitch over in the president's office got the chance to 'smooth things over'. I got some flak here and there but the true journalism professors all recognized what I had done (along with the student who produced the package) and in certain company I was a hero.

I graduated about 3 weeks after that and I consider it one of my best accomplishments of my life. Karl called me about 3-4 months later to tell me the package had won a Society of Professional Journalism awards and that the student was now getting amazing job-offers across the country. That award wouldn't have been possible had the story not made it to air. In a little twist of irony, I later saw the crappy professor talking up the award on some internal video - complimenting the excellent work of this student. What a prick.

My whole point on telling this story is that in certain professions true objectivity is more elegant than any heart-tugging story you can pull out. This student will go on to become a premiere journalist soon and it it weren't for professors like Karl Idsvoog it would have never been possible.

To quote Simmons, "It is kind of scary to intentionally stop being objective, even temporarily; but to tell a moving story, that is what it takes." Yeah right, go kick rocks.

I actually find Simmons book to be overall pretty great for this class. I think it's one of the better books I've read on storytelling. Most of our criticism through the semester was at her presentation and uppity attitude not the actual content. Just my two cents