Posted on Wed, Apr. 02, 2008

Boiling down all that information

There is bias in the following text. What kind?

"Trinity's affiliation with the United Church of Christ makes it part of a liberal, mostly white denomination that was the first in America to ordain gays, women and blacks as ministers."

Is that text (A.) from a radio talk-show script, (B.) special-interest propaganda, (C.) partisan chain letter spin or (D.) an accurate, dispassionate distillation of facts?

And there's bias in this paragraph:

"But in repudiating and putting in context [the Rev. Jeremiah] Wright's inflammatory lines about whites and U.S. foreign policy, Obama, the Democratic presidential front-runner, didn't address other potentially controversial facts about his church and its ties."

Those two paragraphs of straight-news narrative were part of a recently published story from the McClatchy Washington bureau that explored contextual angles related to developments involving Sen. Barack Obama's controversial former pastor and his church.

Reported and written by Margaret Talev, the story "appalled and insulted" one reader.

"Did anyone on your staff notice that Ms. Talev's own personal opinions are sprinkled throughout her article?" she asked. "Her personally biased opinions made her article an editorial."

This is a frequent reader concern regarding political coverage in which a reporter uses a workhorse technique that's as old as the use of written accounts: straight-news narrative, a distillation of information that has far more details than can be accommodated. (Answer D above.)

Credible straight-news narrative is simple, factual and spin-free -- unlike its relative, story-telling narrative, which employs the license and creativity seen, for example, in the Star-Telegram's recent true-crime serial "To Catch a Killer."

In each form, the thoughts and words are the writer's and therefore tinged with subjectivity. Although the print medium has always utilized straight-news narrative, the technique in these politicized times strikes some readers as reportorial editorializing.

As with editorial commentary, narrative text flows from a writer's personal opinion, but in the sense that it's crafted as a summary of the writer's understanding of the information.

Poorly crafted narrative suffers from problems such as imprecise language and careless judgment. Colorful description can be a minefield laced with inaccurate, prejudicial verbs, adjectives and the like. Lost is narrative's underlying motive: to examine and inform within the bounds of accuracy, balance and fairness.

Those were the characteristics of Talev's article, which was a good example of how to write straight-news narrative in response, I should add, to an assignment that gave her clear direction.

In light of so many controversial ties linking Obama, Trinity United Church of Christ and Wright, Talev's assignment was to help readers "learn more about the church -- beyond Rev. Wright. What and who shaped its ideas and ideals," she said in an e-mail exchange.

Talev turned to many sources as she examined complexities ranging from black liberation theology, which TUCC incorporates, to the church's ministries and how Obama and Wright figure into the mosaic.

As in her congressional coverage, Talev applied curiosity unobstructed and unfiltered by personal opinion. That might be difficult for some readers to accept, but that's professionalism at work, she said.

"It is a mantra of newspaper reporting that the coverage be objective, so while (the pursuit of) that becomes second nature it's also something constantly thought about and talked about in our profession. But it's also true that many times reporters really don't have much of an opinion one way or another on a subject."

"On some stories there is a 'truth' that can be pinned down, but on others it is a more elusive task of exploring points of view. The training really is to try to see a subject from many points of view, so as to understand where various sides are coming from," Talev wrote.

That would be an overwhelming volume of information to report without straight-news narrative and the bias -- the aim -- that drives it: keeping the public informed with facts, not opinion.