The root problem with "police said"
Media sociology can teach us why reporters rely on police sources and suggest a better path forward
On May 26, 2020, the Minneapolis Police Department released this statement:
Of course, we all know what happened next.
Were it not for the bravery of Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old who recorded George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin (and the dogged reporting by local reporters in the Minneapolis area), this press release may have stood as the official, final public word on Floyd’s death.
The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the past five years have brought the spotlight not only on American policing, but also the relationship between journalists and police agencies. Simply put, it is often a symbiotic relationship in which police officers get the benefit of the doubt that is rarely extended to those the police interact with.
Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post and Barry Petchesky on Defector both wrote wonderful columns in recent weeks about the need for changes in that relationship.
But let’s tackle the fundamental question. Why do journalists rely so heavily on police sources and police statements?
Decades of media sociology research can provide some answers. In fact, the roots of this relationship can be found in many of the canonical studies into journalism sourcing and news routines. These are older studies — the research dates back nearly 50 years — and these studies admittedly do not address the systemic racism at the heart of these institutions and their practices. But they are still important to illustrate just how ingrained these notions are into daily journalism and to examine the roots.
Media Sociology?
A quick note: A core belief of media sociology is that news is a social construct.
To professional journalists, news is something that exists out there in the world, and it’s a reporter’s job to go out there and find it. News is something to be discovered. The sociological view holds that news is not something that exists in the world. Gaye Tuchman found that news is not a reflection of reality (as the traditional journalistic ethos holds) but instead a construction of reality, which is made by journalists through their routines. Mark Fishman found that news something that is created through journalistic norms, attitudes, practices, and routines. Herbert Gans wrote that news construction is a complex interplay of journalists’ attitudes and practices, and organizational goals and constraints.
The point is that if we want to understand the news, we have to understand how reporters do their jobs (since that defines news).
And if we’re talking about police news, it comes down to two ideas: Sources and deadlines. They are interconnected in understanding this issue.
Sources and deadlines
Let’s start with sources.
Herbert Gans defined sources as “the actors whom journalists observe or interview, including interviewees who appear on the air or who are quoted in magazine articles, and those who supply background information or story suggestion.”
Put plainly, a source is someone who provides information about an event to a journalist. This is a critical role in news production, perhaps the most critical role. News itself has been called “a product of transactions between journalists and their sources (Ericson, Baranek & Chan, 1989), and Gans referred to the journalist-source relationship as both a game of tug-of-war and a dance — one in which the source always leads.
What this means is that official sources, official releases, and statements from government agencies like they police, are treated as news. They are given more weight and consideration because they are official. It’s not necessarily that journalists think they’re “true” but that they are “official” and can be reported. Michael Schudson wrote “Reporters need to interview not just sources, but authoritative ones.”
Police officers, police statements and police reports all carry this authority. Mark Fishman writes:
Bureaucratic accounts have a performative character. They are accounts which are what they report. They have a factual character guaranteed by the normal operations of the society within which they are produced and of which they are a part. When journalists see performative accounts, they know they have seen hard facts.
Second, all bureaucratic accounts — even if they are not performative — are from the outset credible accounts because journalists subscribe to the belief that officials out to know what they are in a position to know … it is a credible account because it is produced by a competent source — a competence which is socially sanctioned through the society and by journalists in particular.
In other words, police reports and police statements get the benefit of the doubt.
So why rely on these sources to begin with? Deadlines.
Look: The newspaper has to come out daily, right? You can’t just say “Welp, nothing happened today, gang. So … we’ve got nothing. See you tomorrow, maybe?” Newspapers make money by publishing daily, and so reporters have to come up with stories every day. That’s one of the reasons why newspapers developed the beat system, as a way to organize their production processes. Tuchman and Fishman wrote extensively about the beat system and the importance of daily deadlines in news production. The general point is that in order to make the reporting process efficient on a daily basis, reporters are assigned beats and must produce stories from those beats every day. As a result of those daily demands, reporters organize their work around regular sources of information — and the police are one of them.
Again, from Fishman:
The (work) steered the reporter away from all institutions (or “communities of action”) relevant to criminality and law enforcement which were not formally constituted or bureaucratically organized. Specifically, the journalist had no regular contact with the underlife of prisons and jails; the unofficially sanctioned practices of law enforcement, judicial, and the penal personnel … the justice reporter regularly exposed himself only to a few strategic points in each agency which were organizational foci of information within the criminal justice system. That is, the police, sheriffs and courts all contained their own reporting systems, and the journalist routinely relied upon the products of these systems for doing his own work.
Doing better
So, what can be done to break these routines and habits?
Petchesky called for a small but radical change in how journalists report:
What I am really calling for here is for the media to reflect on the fundamental relationships connecting them, the police, victims and criminals, and the truth—and to treat cops like they would any other source with obvious motivations. Police statements are not inherently statements of fact. They are claims, by one aggrieved party in a disagreement. Their side is just one side of an argument, but their side gets to go first, and be amplified and rubbed-stamped by the machinery of consent.
Sullivan echoed it:
Another part of doing better is remembering a core tenet of good journalism: Don’t take everything from official sources at face value. Interrogate the information before credulously retailing it to your audience. Verify. Corroborate. Include context.
The Other 51
Episode 147: Make Your Editor Happy with Will Leitch
Will Leitch joins Brian to talk about pandemic life, sports journalism and Will’s upcoming novel, How Lucky.
Will and Brian talk about their lives during the pandemic, how sports journalism survived its self-perceived existential crisis, and how sports’ return helped pave the the way for a return to normalcy.
Will then talks about his upcoming book, which he calls the purest distillation of what he feels abut the world. He talks about how he came up with the idea for How Lucky, why he wanted to write a story about someone with Spinal Muscular Atrophy and the history of the internet, and why he decided to write it as a novel. Will describes his Wonderboys moment with his agent and what it was like when he found out that Stephen King liked his book.
There’s also advice for young writers (and Brian) about how to be more disciplined as a writer. Yes, it’s hard. The trick is to trick yourself out of not doing something.
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