Confronting Our Blind Spots
The experience of ProPublica reporter Logan Jaffe, 31, demonstrates how to reflect upon a place to best tell its story.
Jaffe traveled to the downstate Illinois city of Anna, known regionally for a now-defunct policy of not allowing people of color to be in town after dark. This so-called sundown town was of interest to Jaffe as a study in how historical racism shaped the town in contemporary terms. Overall, the concept of sundown towns conveyed a community that wasnât welcoming, and was often hostile, toward Black people.1
During her multiple trips there, Jaffe recorded her own thoughts by speaking into her audio recorder â a âdebrief with myselfâ she calls it.
âThat was so important and helpful for me to do; it was a story I reported over 1½ to 2 years. I made the habit of driving around town, it was very âTwin Peaksâ â me driving around with a recorder babbling,â she recalls in an interview with me for this edition.
On her first night on her first visit to Anna, Jaffe drove to a local restaurant that she later described in her story as the place to go on a Friday night in this town. She struck up a conversation with a local man whose comments ended up being the lead to her story. But she didnât know that at the time. She wasnât taking notes, and her recorder wasnât running. That evening, when she went back to the Super 8 Motel in Anna, she sat on the bed and recounted the conversation as best she could into her audio recorder.
âIt was helpful to me to remember the present-ness of that moment in my reporting,â Jaffe says.
That audio recording was helpful to me. It wasnât just, âThis is what happened and this is what happenedâ ⌠it was in talking about it that at one point I realized what bothered me about it â it was the fact that he felt comfortable saying that to me. I didnât realize it at the time, but I did when I thought about it later.
So what was the âitâ that she was talking into her recorder about? What did she realize bothered her; what did the local man say? The lead of her story co-published with The Atlantic spells it out, literally and figuratively:
I got into town just after sunset. The lights were on at a place called the Brick House Grill, and if you were out on South Main Street on a Friday night in February, chances are, thatâs where you were going. So I went in, too.
I took a seat at the bar. A man two stools over from me struck up a conversation. I told him I was a journalist from Chicago and asked him to tell me about this town. âYou know how this town is called Anna?â he started. âThatâs for âAinât No N------2 Allowed.ââ He laughed, shook his head and took a sip of his beer.
The man was white. I am white. Everyone else in that restaurant in Anna was white.
Later that night, I realized what shook me most about our conversation: He didnât pause before he said what he said. He didnât look around the room to see whether anyone could hear us. He didnât lower his voice. He just said it.3
Would the guy in the bar have said that to her if she were not white?
I ask Jaffe. âI donât know,â she responds.
I asked myself it a lot: Could have I done this story if I wasnât white? For a lot of reasons it wouldnât have been the same story. Me being a white person I think made people feel like I was ⌠somehow complicit in the same feelings and attitudes.
Fact-checking the underlying narrative. Who we are as journalists matters on many levels. It matters because who we are affects how we encounter sources and events, and how sources encounter us as journalists. Who we are influences how we process interviews and interactions with sources. Jaffeâs audio download of her day helped her hear something she might not have otherwise: The casualness with which the man used that searing racial epithet.
Jaffe is aware of the journalistic habit of parachuting into a community for a couple days, interviewing a smattering of locals to get various viewpoints, and publishing work that presumes to sum up an entire community. Can an outsider fairly do that in a couple days? In a week? In Jaffeâs last visit to Anna, she reviewed with each source the quotes and context of what would be in the story. The fact-checking meant confronting some sources with some fairly ugly statements theyâd made.
âThey would be like, âYup I said that.â Those reactions from people were a big learning moment for me,â she says. âPeople did say what they said. If you show up multiple times that really helps.â
âI think a lot about the idea of fact checking: Fact checking is checking facts. But how do you fact check the underlying narrative of a place, a community? How do you know the reason why you are reporting in a place or why you went to a particular neighborhood is the narrative that is held by everybody? That is an endlessly fascinating question to me,â she says.
Jaffe frames two critical questions that embody themes that run throughout this book: How do you fact check the underlying narrative of a place, a community? How do you know the reason why you are reporting in a place or why you went to a particular neighborhood is the narrative that is held by everybody?
Put another way: How do you fairly and accurately capture the authentic, complicated, below-the-surface narrative of a place, a person or an idea?
It starts, Jaffe teaches us, by not only listening closely to sources but also listening closely to your own voice.
This book seeks to explore what we as journalists bring to the story because of who we are and how our thinking about the world affects accuracy and fairness.
To report on the rich variety of people in this world and do that well requires understanding that there are many ways to look at the world, each valid in its own right. This book is about how journalists acquire, filter and judge information, and how, as journalists, we must do our utmost to remove as many preconceptions and assumptions from the information we provide as possible. Contemporary U.S. society is rife with labels that sort us into various factions, partisanships and alliances. Part of the job of a journalist is to figure out which of the labels matter and why. We have to know the why in order to get out of the way of the story and allow the truest story at that moment to tell itself.
Journalism with an Open Mind
Journalists work in a multicultural, multiethnic, multifaceted world. Communicating information about the world â without systematically excluding any group of people from news coverage â requires being conversant in diverse cultures and ways of being. Journalists need to be aware of and knowledgeable about the wide variety of people and circumstances around them. This diversity includes but is not limited to race; ethnicity; gender; sexual identity, expression and orientation; religion; geography; physical and mental ability; and socioeconomic standing.
Journalists also need to understand how their own thinking processes can influence the news account they deliver to audiences. To give a fair account of a person or situation requires that journalists identify and seek to monitor and mitigate the effects of their assumptions, biases and prejudices on their news reporting. Only then can we be as accurate as possible and portray news events with relevant context. After all, excellent journalism is founded on seeking and telling the truth. Truth relies on context and on accuracy, which are influenced by our perceptions, interpretations and conclusions about people and events.
Understanding your mind. An important step to achieving a journalistic standard of accuracy and fairness is to understand how, as an individual journalist, you encounter the world. Some questions to get you started on this self-study:
What preconceptions do you bring to different situations?
What do you notice?
What donât you notice?
How do you categorize people and events?
How does your upbringing affect your ability to interact with people unlike you?
Is your mind able to tolerate some ambiguity in a situation?
Do you need things to be concrete and quickly defined?
Knowing your own mind allows you to better navigate the mental processes that unfairly bias your thinking. News audiences need journalists who view the world with an open mind and who are relentlessly critical about the ways that they approach stories.
Where we have been, where we are going. This era of journalism in the first quarter of the 21st century is tumultuous on so many fronts: The economic upheaval of traditional funding models of news outlets that is leading to pared-down staff and closures; the transformative nature of digital news and information that produces both rich storytelling and eye-catching misinformation at breathtaking speeds; and the surging civic unrest aimed at realigning and rightsizing social groups in our country. All of these elements are calling upon the journalism profession to reckon with its own biases.
And it is that last reality, of journalismâs reckoning with itself, that necessarily means this book is filled with facts, research, data, ideas, reminders guidelines and good advice, but it is not a strict how-to manual. If this new century has taught us anything as journalists, it is that one-size-fits-all doesnât fit at all with 21st-century stories, journalists or audiences. This is an invitation to ask yourself the hard questions posed here and to put th...
