Word count: 938 | Reading time: 4 min read
Pretzel Logic
The young teenager spoke with the weary wisdom of a press-flogged pol. “Reporters,” said the girl, “are all liars.”
A student in Ileen Green’s seventh-grade class at the Rush Middle School in the Northeast, the girl was not speaking in the abstract. The girl, who asked that her name not be used, was speaking from experience.
“TV came here in February a week after a fight. Made the whole thing a racial incident when it wasn’t. Yeah, you reporters. All liars.”
I had heard this before, but rarely from somebody so young.
I knew I had to work fast, or we’d lose another reader for good.
Ileen Green tries to find creative solutions to the vast array of problems besetting the public school system.
One of Green’s solutions is to have her students put out a newspaper. A few months ago, Green — who routinely invites media types, politicians and other guests to speak to her students — asked if I could come and talk about the editing process.
I feel duty-bound to brainwash young minds and get them to read newspapers and, if I’m really good, get them to seek a career in the business. So it was a request I readily accepted.
Watching the fidgeting, fussing crowd fill the Rush auditorium, I knew that a mere speech wasn’t going to do.
Assuming the role of editor, I began asking the assembled students what they wanted to know about. When they raised their hands, I assigned them stories on their topic.
One student was upset the school has no football team. “You just bought yourself an assignment,” I told the kid, explaining that he should contact school officials, the Home-School Association, teachers and coaches to get the complete picture.
Another kid wanted to know more about the school’s policy of not allowing girls and boys to eat together in the lunchroom.
“Really?” I asked, having never heard of that before in the public schools. “Really,” said the kid. “It’s because the boys be freaking on the girls.” “Freaking?”
“Yeah, you know, feeling them up and stuff.”
“OK, you have an assignment,” I told him.
A group of four girls in the front row was doing a story about school violence. They said school officials were reluctant to discuss the problem.
I told them they are entitled to any public information about incidents of violence. I gave the names and phone numbers of the police public affairs office and school spokesperson Paul Hansen and told them to feel free to use the phone if they were having any problems getting information. Thegirls alternated between interest in the subject and defiance of their teachers.
Soon after, the assembly disintegrated into bedlam. Several students were asked to leave, and finally an exasperated Green apologized for the disruptions, dismissed the other students and asked if I would talk to her students in the much more manageable setting of her classroom.
The girls involved in the violence project said that students at Rush felt unsafe. But they had no proof.
I told them how they could conduct an admittedly unscientific study by asking students and teachers to fill out a survey asking if they had ever been victims of, or witnesses to an act of violence.
There was a lot of enthusiasm. But when I asked the girls about the incident with the fight and the TV coverage, the mood changed. It was one of these girls who remarked that reporters are liars.
Seeing that all this hormonal energy had finally become focused, I decided to use a gun incident they’d told me about, which nobody had covered, as a practical lesson on how to gather the news.
Excitedly and all at once, the students began talking about the day a girl brought a gun to school. “She was mad at her boyfriend,” said one student. “She had planned it out,” said another.
Going around the room, I asked each student what they knew about the incident, either firsthand or hearsay. As I questioned the class, I also explained that this was how reporters are supposed to operate — gathering as much data as possible to best pinpoint the truth and, unlike theTV crew, put the facts in their proper context.
The best information, I explained, comes from documents, eyewitnesses and those with other firsthand knowledge.
One student insisted that I not use his name and expressed severe doubt that I would heed his wish for anonymity.
His request was an opportunity for another lesson; while it is always better to have named sources, if someone speaks to me anonymously I have entered into a contract and must live by that agreement.
The final lesson about newsgathering, I explained, was to approach official sources for their comments. Without sandbagging them. To tell them that no news story is complete without their comments, data and observations.
Days later, I spoke to school spokesman Hansen who said that, indeed, a girl had been arrested at the school in October for bringing in an unloaded handgun and storing it in her locker. The arrest took place shortly after her arrival and no one was in danger. The girl, whose name was notreleased, was transferred to the Shallcross school for troubled kids.
It would have been a much juicier story if I’d written about a pistol-packing pubescent threatening her schoolmates.
But the facts are the facts and the truth is the truth and good journalists really do know the difference. A lesson I hope Green’s journalism students take to heart.
