Why I Report for the Chron

The more I learn about the social sciences and the humanities, the less I believe in objective truth or reality. I think that there is only first-person experience, cobbled together with communication and ideologies. There is always a bias and we can never escape it. “Objectivity” is, at best, presenting the median ideology and viewpoints of the time period.

So I don’t think that any newspaper can ever be objective as it would like to be. Just as simply observing phenomenon will change their outcome (see the observer effect in physics), journalism is not merely a reflection of reality-- it is also a creation of reality. Even in the Chronicle-- a newspaper with fairly limited scope and readership-- I can see how we construct stories for our readers, how the language we choose will shape the contours of our readers’ realities.

As the first-hand eyes and ears, reporters have a lot of power over what the truth is and will be seen as going forward. In my small way, I want to use a bit of that power to shed light on horrors that people don’t know enough about, like mass incarceration. Had I not pitched and written the mass criminalization story, the medical neglect experiences of the two panelists at Durham County Jail likely never would have made it to the Chron.

Yet, I have no illusions about the Chronicle’s readership. I don’t think it’s particularly high, but that doesn’t really matter to me. One reason is that if even just one person is influenced, that’s enough for me. Another larger reason is that I see my work as mainly contributing to a daily, historical archive of what was happening in our community. I want people to know that this happened.

Finally, I love the voyeurism of being a reporter. I have excuses to go to events and talk to cool people, to take tiny peeks into all of the lives, experiences, communities, and thoughts of Duke University-- and to a lesser extent, Durham. I’ll never be able to live it all, so being a reporter humbles me. It reminds me that I usually only experience a very small slice of life and that there’s so much more.

I have no intention of going into journalism, but I love reporting for the Chron.

-------


P.S. The musings on truth and epistemology are not particularly well-thought out or informed, so please don’t hold me to them, haha! Also, life has many surprises and sites as cool as Polygraph make me want to be part of the new wave of journalism.