One of the things that people who work in news think they can do better that mere mortals is determine what the news is. Cutting through the PR and getting to the nut of things is a skill that supposedly takes years of journalism school training.
Quite often, an editor will get a story from a young, inexperienced reporter and, after looking it over, will call the reporter over and say, “You buried the lede,” or, “You backed into this story.”
The object is to get the most important fact or facts at the top of the story so that a good, newsy headline can be written.
OK, I know this doesn’t happen much these days. Reporters now think of themselves as “storytellers” rather than reporters. They, and their editors, sadly, want their stories to read like the first paragraphs of a novel.
That’s why you get so many news stories like this exaggerated example:
Jane Doe is on welfare, and lives in a rent-subsidized apartment with her autistic child. Because of the Bush economy that President Obama inherited, she can’t afford premium cable.
She has had many disappointments in her life, but when she came down the stairs from her bedroom on Sunday, she got a surprise that ruined her day. At the bottom of the steps she found her entire family butchered by coked-up escaped convicts.
So, is the news here that Jane is on welfare and lives in a rent-subsidized apartment, or is it that here entire family was butchered by coked-up escaped convicts? I think you know the answer.
While it is exaggerated in the sense that even the most dense reporter or editor would see that the murder of a family should be in the lede, too often, when the news is less tragic, it gets buried in the second, third, or fourth paragraph.
Here’s an example from real life, the News & Observer’s website, in fact:
Note the headline, “Perdue seen favorably by a third.”
Note the lede: “One out of three North Carolinians have a favorable opinion of Gov. Bev Perdue, according to a new poll.”
Note the second sentence in the third paragraph: “Perdue dropped 15 points from the previous month among Democrats, according to Civitas.”
Let’s say you work for Gov. Perdue and you have just seen these poll results. Would you be likely to rush into the governor’s office and exclaim excitedly, “Governor, you are seen favorably the a third of the people in North Carolina.”
Or would you tell her that there is some bad news in the latest Civitas Poll, and that news is that, even among Democrats, she is plummeting like GM stock?
I think the latter, which makes that the news, not that a dwindling 33 percent of the public still see her favorably.
Now let’s look at what the amateurs, the non-professional journalists at the Civitas Institute, did with the reporting of these poll results. Here is their report:
Note the headline: “Democratic Support for Perdue Plummets.”
Note the lede: “The percentage of Democratic voters with a favorable opinion of Democratic Gov. Perdue dropped 15 percent from 55 to 40 percent since June, according to a new poll released today by the Civitas Institute.”
I’ll leave it to you, the consumer, to decide which one of the two got the news wrong, and why.
Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.