'What makes the front page and what gets buried'
Posted on Saturday, August 09 @ 09:20:31 EDT
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By Frederick Maryland, Demagogue
Okay. Suppose for just a moment that you're a news editor for The Washington Post. The deadline is approaching for the Friday edition of the newspaper. A news story has just been sent your way, and you've got to decide how important it is and where it should go. Here's the lead paragraph:
"In one of the most brazen and well-organized attacks in recent months, 40 suspected Taliban fighters armed with assault rifles shot up a government office in southern Afghanistan yesterday, killing six Afghan soldiers and a driver for a U.S. aid organization."
Do you run this story on one of the first few pages of the newspaper or do you bury it at the bottom of page A-12 under the heading "World in Brief"?
The Post chose to bury this story on page A-12. This is strange given that newspapers generally play up a story that they feel broadcast media will ignore because they have no video or audio to support it. Given that virtually all major Western broadcast news outlets have essentially left Afghanistan, one would think The Post would seize an opportunity to let the public know what TV and radio won't report -- that Taliban forces have re-emerged in Afghanistan with surprising strength.
The Post could rightly argue that Thursday was a busy news day and that they had to choose from a number of important stories. Yet one of the stories that The Post chose to put on its front page defies all logic -- intellectual or journalistic. This story concerned national security adviser Condoleezza Rice's speech to the National Association of Black Journalists and carried the edgy, earth-shattering headline: U.S. Promises Democracy in Middle East.
This story is one, great big yawn. Reporter Peter Slevin's not a bad writer, but there's just nothing to say, no real news. The story begins:
"The Bush administration made a broad pledge yesterday to spread democracy and free markets to the Middle East ..."
I can almost hear an editor shout from the far end of the newsroom, "Hey, Charlie, hold page 1! We just got a scoop ... get this: America wants democracy in the Middle East!" Who would have guessed? The administration should have been charged advertising rates per column inch for this story.
Having worked in the newspaper field, I can imagine what happened. The Post agrees to send staff reporter Peter Slevin to Dallas to cover Rice's speech. My guess is that the original thought by the editor who approved Slevin's trip was that Rice might say something new or surprising about Iraq, the administration's intelligence-gathering or some related issue. But what is new or surprising about a Bush administration spokesperson saying that the White House wants democracy to take root in Iraq?
In his story, even Slevin seems to recognize that there was no real substance to this speech. He writes:
"[Rice] offered few details of a project whose prospects have been greeted with widespread skepticism, particularly in the Middle East itself, where the depth of the administration's spoken commitment to Arab democracy remains unproved." It's a classic case of how decisions on deploying reporters can trump a judicious assessment of what is truly newsworthy. If your editor sends you out of town to cover a speech, the easiest thing to do is to write a story. But tell your editor there's no news, and you might be made to feel like the fisherman who came home without a fish.
You'd normally expect more from The Post, but, every now and then, I find myself glancing back at the top of the front page just to make sure someone didn't deliver the Washington Times to my door by mistake.
Reprinted from Demagogue:
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