Here are some of the thoughts and questions in my mind today after listening to an urban planner/professor and expert on Chinese sustainability speak, and talking to Professors Chen and Fang:
– If journalists expect to be objective in their reporting, they must be objective with the questions they ask their sources.
– Thus, with the above reasoning, journalists should not enter an interview with a hidden agenda.
– Journalists should keep in mind who/what their source is representing at that point in time. The expert on sustainability works with the government and has dealt with media before; of course she is not going to say anything against those things.
– But, if it’s an interview – or digging through evidence – to find out “x” factor that is not transparent, then does it become necessary to adopt an “agenda”, if obtaining that information becomes the mission?
– But is the very act of finding any information on its own an agenda?
– If a non-profit organization, company, etc. pretty much writes their own articles for the media, then that’s not journalism – that’s public relations.
– Public relations isn’t the sister of journalism – journalism has no boundaries on information reporting (other than when seeking to minimize harm, per the second entry on the SPJ Code of Ethics, which is to minimize harm… but I might delve into that later)… but public relations does. Journalism, in theory (not necessarily in practice), goes one step further than public relations.
One of the things the expert on Chinese sustainability mentioned was that China’s news covers the concept of “green” more than people can imagine, in a higher and better capacity than the United States covers it. The expert used an example of something he/she had heard on a morning radio show in the United States, which was someone stating that the source of climate change is the sun, and that you wouldn’t hear such an unintelligent statement in the Chinese press.
– To quote Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
– Based on the expert’s statement about what the climate denier said… does the notion of a “free press” (“free” meaning no third party stands between the journalist and the source and limits what can or cannot be said) mean the slowing down of progress in areas such as environmental issues?
In retrospect, the urban developer/professor somewhat answered my question above without even knowing it. He talked about how after the U.S. embassy showed the air quality index (I believe he was referencing Shanghai, and not Beijing), coverage of environmental issues increased in the Chinese media, although even before that, there was lots of coverage on “green,” just not the grassroots side of it (which is what the organization he works for focuses on). The government even gives money to make green buildings happen. Free-flowing information can spark a change, and I think even terribly researched opinions (like those of global warming deniers in the United States), can start movement in the “right” direction (in the case of the environment, towards greener initiatives), because whenever there is a statement, there is also a counterstatement.
A worker with the Shanghai Subway Company gave the second lecture of the day. My interaction with this speaker and others and watching the interactions of the group with this speaker and others has reinforced the importance of clarification in asking questions in journalism. The worker talked about how safety is one of the biggest challenges facing the Shanghai subway system right now. I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by safety – as safety can encompass many things – so I asked her to define it. She answered that by “safety,” she meant “daily safety” – getting people where they want to go and having drivers who work carefully on a daily basis.
So far, this trip has made me think a lot about the practice, process, and implications of journalism.
*The newspaper pictured above is not related to the speakers or lecture topics. It is merely a newspaper I saw in a coffee shop.
