'Expose, illuminate, provoke discussion'
DISCUSSIONS | May 22, 2006
Valerie Hyman
valeriehyman@betternews.com
1987 Nieman fellow; news consultant and trainer
Halt the he-said, she-said coverage. It's insufficient, lazy, and sheds no light on important issues. Instead of spending time getting reaction quotes, test the veracity and authenticity of the original statement. Journalists are under no legal obligation to provide equal space and/or time to opposing candidates. We ARE obliged, however, to expose and illuminate and provoke discussion of critical matters.
Develop questions about big community issues at the very start of campaigns and ask them of all candidates. Don't wait for the candidates to put these issues on the table. In many cases, they'll need prompting, to say the least.
Expose political ploys for what they are. Most journalists are perfectly well aware of the tactics the candidates employ. For some reason, we often keep them to ourselves, as if there is some kind of need to shield the public. Explain these tactics to viewers and readers. Put them in context.
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Retaliation is a chilling but real possibility, writes George Wilson, and it might bring about drastic losses of freedoms we now take for granted. Are we sowing the seeds for our own destruction as a democracy? 
Juan Cole writes that the nearly nonexistent coverage of the catastrophic Pakistani deluge is another example of how the failure of our electronic media to inform the public about centrally important global developments is itself a security threat to the republic.
Bill Schiller of the Toronto Star: ‘Our arrival sparked a sensation: Police swept in demanding our papers. The crowd swept in on them to make sure we stayed…Then something extraordinary happened: The people applauded us.’
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This column first appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Nieman Reports.
The e-mail message from Hollman Morris was unexpected. It was “urgent,” he said. “Please call im- mediately on Skype.”
I reached him and his brother, Juan Pablo, in Bogota. His image on the computer screen revealed a stricken man at pains to say that [...] 
Cleaning up in the wake of the 2010 Iowa State Fair will be daunting this year. In addition to the mess left by nearly 1 million visitors and thousands of farm animals, we have a continuing saga of news coverage that told of possible racial assaults and then, in Saturday Night Live fashion, appears [...]
(Editor’s note: The incidents described here have become part of a developing story, as this Google link shows.)
The Des Moines Register’s reluctance to identify criminal suspects or victims by race has turned into an outright refusal to do so.
The closing night of the Iowa State Fair was marked by an observance not exactly on the [...]
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