“…Being impartial or neutral is not a core principle of journalism. …impartiality was never what was meant by objectivity. …the critical step in pursing truthfulness and informing citizens is not neutrality but independence…. This applies even to those who work … Read more
“A commitment to citizens is more than professional egoism. It is the implied covenant with the public…. The notion that those who report the news are not obstructed from digging up and telling the truth—even at the expense of the … Read more
“In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art…. Journalism alone is focused first on getting what happened down right…. Perhaps because the discipline of verification is so personal and so haphazardly … Read more
“…This forum function of the press would make it possible to create a democracy even in a large, diverse country by encouraging what James Madison and others considered the basis upon which democracy would stand—compromise, compromise, compromise…. In the new … Read more
“… This classic way of posing the question of engagement—as information versus storytelling, or what people need versus what people want—is a distortion. This is not how journalism is practiced, journalists told us. Nor is it, we believe, how people … Read more
“On this there is absolute unanimity and also utter confusion: Everyone agrees journalists must tell the truth. Yet people are fuddled about what “the truth” means…. This desire that information be truthful is elemental. Since news is the material that … Read more
“In 1964, the Pulitzer Prize, the most coveted award in newspapers, went to the Philadelphia Bulletin in a new reporting category…called Investigative Reporting. …the journalism establishment was acknowledging a kind of work increasingly done in recent years by a new … Read more
It’s the tendency to focus on the celebrity, the character, not serious character but personality traits of political figures that trivializes the political process. So the focus of this discussion will be on issues which might be overlooked or underreported in the 2000 campaigns. Issues like those that David Broder spoke of last May when he wrote in his column that it’s quite a trick for something to grow larger and at the same time become more invisible. Broder was talking about the health care issue then, but he might just as well have been talking about any one of a number of issues that loom ill-defined in the background of the campaign rhetoric that focuses on youthful indiscretions or political money.
– Nieman Curator Bill Kovach opening the political Watchdog Journalism conference Read more
Bill Kovach received the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University March 9, 2000. Here are excerpts from his speech. Let me begin with full disclosure. The truth … Read more