FRONTLINE: LAW AND DISORDER
Friendly Rating: Teens and older.
Safety Rating: Some repeated pictures of shooting victims, including one corpse.
Quality Rating: Overall, pretty good.
Airing on PBS tonight, check your local listings for times.
Consider this an exercise in news literacy. The doc is about the investigation into the shootings of several citizens by New Orleans police in the chaos of the days following Hurricane Katrina. Reporters from ProPublica.com, the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans and Frontline, PBS’ news magazine, all worked together to follow up on rumors that some of the cops had gone too far while trying to protect the city from looters.
I think this is a creditable piece of journalism, but I offer it to you to see if you can find some of the tell-tale signs of sloppy reporting. Why? Because in this day of information overload, news literacy – the ability to look at a piece of reporting to spot biases (there is no such thing as complete objectivity), inaccuracies or the likelihood of inaccuracies, and just plain sloppy reporting – is more important than ever.
I don’t think you’ll find any problems, but I do have my biases and have to be aware of them. Bias isn’t the problem, in my opinion. It’s the inability to present both sides of the story fairly. There are times when a story is one-sided, and presenting the other side can actually be mis-leading. This happened over the past few years over the global warming debate – most reputable scientists considered global warming/climate change and the only people who questioned it were on the fringes of science. But normally, if a story is presented with only one perspective, chances are that story is missing a critical detail or two.
Another sign something may be wrong with a report is if most of the sources are unnamed or refuse to go on camera. Sometimes, there’s a reason for that – people afraid for their personal safety and/or livelihoods – so ask your kids if they think the unnamed people had reason to fear for their lives. If not, then it’s time to question the report.
Are there any documents supporting the report? Public documents, in particular, are a good sign because they’re public. They’re hard to argue with.
Again, I don’t think you’ll find any evidence of the above in this doc. If anything, it seems like an excellent piece of journalism, with minimal judgments and everyone getting their fair say. The only people they missed where the cops that were actually indicted and that may have been because they’re in jail. But there are lots of cops speaking on camera, along with the victims’ and their families. All-in-all, an example of reporting done well.
