Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

The Nature of News 45
The possibility that such authorities, perhaps the police
spokesperson or a criminal psychiatrist in the case of the Columbine
killings, have either a professional or personal interest in the
outcome or meaning of the story is discounted. The literal facts that
they offer, while they do provide a disciplined and ethical basis to
the story, also limit it to the extent that it is rendered entirely banal,
without either meaning or context. In this case, from the earliest
reports, it was clear that the whole issue of American gun culture,
central to any reasoned understanding of the tragedy, was off-limits.
It would have remained so had the National Rifle Association’s
national convention not been planned for Denver within days of the
killings and copycat attacks not occurred around the USA in the
following weeks.
Views which are considered extreme by the existing dominant
culture, even if they are legitimate, even the norm, in other cultures,
are filtered out at the beginning of the process and remain unvoiced.
The journalist, as representative of an objective and impartial news
media, selects the evidence on behalf of the readership. Objectivity
and impartiality are clearly, as Stuart Hall has described them, ‘operational
fictions’ suited to ‘push’ media and to a particular economic
and social system. They scientifically guarantee the logic of the journalism
as unassailable and that integrity accrues to the system that
produced it.
We have … some obligation to be impartial. We try to be objective
… but you can’t make a good film which presents both points
of view. 5
While Jeremy Isaacs, at this time controller of features at Thames
Television, asserts that reporting must have a point of view, he also
reinforces the assumptions, first that objectivity is an attainable goal
and also that, for most issues, there are only two points of view, the
miners and the government, the Brits and the Argentinians, the
Serbians and the rest of humanity, etc. On the briefest reflection this
turns out to be wrong. In any news story, even one so apparently
black and white as the Columbine School killings in Colorado in
1999, there is clearly an intricate complex of points of view and
interests at stake – the families of the slain, the police, the National
Rifle Association, the school, the families of the killers – and that