Quote:
|
Tabloid papers depende on sensationalism to sell their quota of papers, they always spice up the story, adding one or two ambiguous details that change the nature of the story.
|
I agree with that. Then again, should you accept every fact as it is presented? And should you present every fact as it is given? Often that means taking one of the side's position, or else you're effectively ridiculing the position you're covering.
Quote:
|
By definition, journalism is about reporting the facts as they appear. Sugarcoating the story is a personnal choice the colunist or editor makes, with the sales figures in mind.
|
A good point. And often it seems both case, style and facts are chosen in advance of the covered event to a certain degree. Still, look at this article about the crashed wedding:
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/...04/0521-01.htm
It doesn't mention the shooting in the air, they have not bothered to hear other than the general dismissives of any military leader told to justify some atrocity he may know little about. Instead they take the viewpoint of the surviving village eyewitnesses. But is it clearly biased or possibly untrue? It's also a short story being told to a certain degree, the grief of both villagers and reporter shines through the still very careful vocabulary, but could it have been written otherwise? Isn't this honesty of a sort as well? (Given, of course, that the reporter actually writes what he sees.)
Another thing is that if this reporter from the Guardian was one of the few ones on site, the summarizing and "factual" articles in other papers might have used this article as a draft, minus the embroidery. That's also happened before.