(Note how I'm saying 'we', as I'm just about to challenge my very own straw man.)
Well, whenever I have introduced my PhD work I have been claiming that, surprisingly, it is still possible for print reporters to cause a stir by using the first person singular. Teachers and handbooks of journalism still advise against it; readers still react strongly to it as they write letters to the editor expressing their love or hate for reporters who make the rhetorical choice to enter the stage themselves at the expense of the story they were supposed to be covering; and the recent (afore-mentioned) debate at WriterL proves that the first person singular in reporting remains (again: somewhat surprisingly) a narrative form that quite a few people, even among feature journalists devoted to long narrative forms, still take a strong and general stand against: Don't do it! Don't say I! It's too hard to do it well, and remember, as another objection goes, that you're a reporter, not an artist.
But the times they are a-changin', of course, and as professor Martin Eide wrote in a review of my dissertation (Rhetorica Scandinavica 41/2007):
Is it not a galopping norm these days that journalists must "put themselves on the line?"
In the coming posts, I'll make an effort to discover how much of a gallop we're talking about and how much straw should be pulled out of my straw man.
Input is welcome:
Do reporters (and note that we're not talking about columnists and commentators) get personal in the papers you're reading - and does it make you raise an eyebrow at all?
2 comments:
Interesting post, interesting blog. In this case though, i would say the answer is 'yes' to both sides of your argument. Yes, it is a growing norm that news journalists put themselves and their opinions on the line. One good example is the New Yorks Times, for which the tone is now created increasingly by a diverse chorus of voices from the individual writers. The 'Health' section, one realizes after following for a while, is a conversation between writers who have very different takes on the emergent (and controversial) research. Gina Kolata takes a very different approach from Parker Pope, and from Michael Pollan. Similarly, in style, the stories, and video outputs are more and more reflective of a personal opinion, or taste - the recent architectural piece on the longevity house was a classic example - everything from the music to the filming to the tone of the writer/speaker conveyed a pronounce attitude toward the artists, and towards the general movement of which they are a part.
It can be seen as a powerfully positive direction, in fact, that the newspaper is moving as it is - but the other side of the coin is that it has not been articulated in any kind of public format, by the paper or by a reader. So the straw man may be just exactly that, but only recently so, and it may still be worth at least pointing the transition out as a marked transition that deserves a little air-time. Just thoughts - thanks for an interesting question!
Yes, I guess it is becoming a commonplace that we have moved from News to Views in journalism, but there is no interesting way of simply generalizing. It is happening to different degrees and serves various rhetorical functions from paper to paper and from section to section, and as you point out: you'll have to follow, say, the Health section for a while to figure out what the consequences are. So yes, air time for close readings still seems justified, and thanks for pointing out one case that could be worth looking into.
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