Introduction to Public Affairs Reporting

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Introduction to Public Affairs Reporting

• Why do we do it?23 February 2004PAR JOURNALISM
  2004

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Public Affairs Reporting

• Journalism as a professional career can be
  exciting, but it isnt always safe.
• One Tongan journalist living in New Zealand was
  jailed in 1996 for contempt of Parliament and his
  newspaper was banned for five months in 2003.
• Several journalists in Australia were jailed or
  fined in the 1990s for contempt of court for
  refusing to divulge sources.
• In Queensland, two journalists went before the
  courts in 2000 and could have been jailed for
  interviewing prisoners without permission.

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Public Affairs Reporting

• According to RSF, 25 journalists were killed in
  2002 because of their work, at least 692 were
  arrested and 1420 were physically assaulted or
  threatened.
• 389 media outlets were censored.
• On 1 January 2003, 118 journalists were in
  prison.
• One of the most publicised murders of a
  journalist happened in 1996 when Irish reporter
  Veronica Guerin was assassinated on behalf of
  drug dealers she had been investigating.
• Remote? Personal experience.

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Public Affairs Reporting
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Public Affairs Reporting

• Reporting involves two vital skills gathering
  news and writing it.
• Ideally, a reporter will have a good measure of
  both.
• In reality, it isnt uncommon for a reporter to
  be adept at writing, but be a poor news gatherer.
• Alternatively, she or he may be a magnet for news
  and information but not so gifted at writing.
• Broadly speaking, news gathering is more valued
  than news writing.
• On deadline, the news exec prefers the gatherer.

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Public Affairs Reporting

• News is NOT found in the newsroom.
• News is also NOT found on the internet.
• News is found on the footpath, in boardrooms, in
  public records and even in the pubs.
• Good reporters have many contacts, professional
  and social. They will talk to ANYONE.
• As professional observers, they see differences
  whereas others see similarities.
• Some journalists have the insights and ability to
  break through agendas with new angles into
  running news stories that stir people!

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Public Affairs Reporting

• An example of this is John Pilger.
  An Australian journalist based in the
  UK for many years, he has been an
  investigative reporter who has broken new ground
  on many stories such as Pol Pots genocide in
  Kampuchea (now Cambodia), Indonesian oppression
  in East Timor before it became independent, and
  more recently the global double standards over
  Israel and Palestine.
• He also made a ground-breaking programme on the
  new rulers of the world globalisation.
• Video clip.

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Public Affairs Reporting

• Quote from John Pilger (The New Rulers of the
  World)on the so-called global economy
  
• The attacks of September 11, 2001, did not
  change everything, but accelerated the
  continuity of events, providing an extraordinary
  pretext for destroying social democracy.

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Public Affairs Reporting

• Quote from John Pilger (The New Rulers of the
  World)
• The undermining of the Bill of Rights in the US
  and the further dismantling of trial by jury in
  Britain and a plethora of related civil liberties
  are part of the reduction of democracy to
  electoral ritual that is, competition between
  indistinguishable parties for the management of a
  single-ideology state.

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Public Affairs Reporting

• Quote from John Pilger (The New Rulers of the
  World)
• Central to the growth of this business state
  are the media conglomerates, which have
  unprecedented power, owning press and television,
  book publishing, film production and databases.
  They provide a virtual world of the eternal
  present, as Time magazine called it politics by
  media, war by media, justice by media, even grief
  by media (Princess Diana).

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Public Affairs Reporting

• The skills you pick up from the Public Affairs
  Reporting course are the same skills needed for
  much investigative reporting.
• Who can tell us about the Watergate scandal that
  brought down an American president?
• This is regarded as an icon of investigative
  journalism and is still the topic of debate even
  until today.
• It became the subject of a famous film, All The
  Presidents Men, based on a book by the reporters
  Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Clip

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Public Affairs Reporting

• It is the story of how two Washington
  Post journalists stumbled upon a huge
  conspiracy of political corruption
  involving President Nixon himself.
• No comparison with the Bill Clinton and the
  Monicagate scandal. (Resignation, 40 jailed.)
• It started with a little court case about a
  burglary on a Democrat Party office in the
  Watergate building in June 1972.
• It took 18 months of plugging away by the
  reporters, trawling through records trying to
  gets scraps of info to build up the jigsaw puzzle.

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Public Affairs Reporting

• Even student journalists get in on the act with
  investigative stories.
• In 2001, a group of journalism students from the
  School of Journalism at Northwestern University
  under the leadership of Prof David Protess, the
  author of The Journalism of Outrage, researched
  death row prisoner Anthony Medill.
• In trying to track down witnesses who could clear
  this man and identify the real killer, the
  students did painstaking searches of public
  records, phone books, equivalent of the electoral
  register and so on. Medill was pardoned and set
  free.
• .

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Public Affairs Reporting

• In Sydney, the students of UTS exposed
  skulduggery over the Olympic Games.
• In Fiji, the students of the University of the
  South Pacific reporting on the coup exposing some
  of the people in the shadows behind the crisis
  and also some of the fugitive gunmen and militant
  leaders involved in the Solomon Islands crisis.
• There have also been many investigative style
  stories in New Zealand such as the Winebox affair
  in the 1990s, Metros Unfortunate Experiment
  about cervical cancer treatment (or lack of it)
  at the National Womens Hospital in the 1980s.
• .

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Public Affairs Reporting

• PAR involves plenty of smaller stories which
  can be local bombshells in the community, dug out
  of council agendas, or drawn from government
  bodies through use of the Official Information
  Act.
• Some of you may have ideals about how journalism
  exposes and highlights issues having an impact on
  your readers and listeners.
• Remember that old definition News is something
  someone somewhere doesnt want people to know
  all the rest is advertising!
• .

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Public Affairs Reporting

• The importance of a local story Grey Lynn flood
  2 February 2004
• .

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Public Affairs Reporting

• The reporting work involved is 90 routine.
• And it comes with knowing your way around the
  sources of information
• The public records
• The courts
• The local councils
• The agendas of local government meetings
• Government departments

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Public Affairs Reporting

• Who has read the Herald today?
• What stories fit into the public affairs
  category?
• This course is an introduction to the skills that
  you need to
• Gather public affairs stories
• How to report them safely, legally speaking
• These skills are fundamental to good journalism
• Talking about exposes such as Watergate or health
  issues, have a think about what affects you on a
  day-to-day basis

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Public Affairs Reporting

• Our lives are regulated by laws set down by layer
  upon layer of government. Examples
• If you drove to AUT today, you have a drivers
  licence. Recently you may have had to pay for one
  as part of user-pays.
• Public awareness through journalism stopped plans
  to store lots more personal information on this.
• Your car or the bus that brought you, had to
  be registered and have a warrant of fitness.
• You got here safely deaths on buses are rare in
  NZ, but not in other countries, eg Nigeria.

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Public Affairs Reporting

• If you came by bus how easy was it to catch?
  How convenient the timetable? How much does it
  cost you? These issues are all debated in public
  forums at local council meetings.
• Britomart Transport Centre is it working?
• It is because of journalists like you that people
  become aware of the issues.
• Only through journalists keeping people informed
  did we retain services with deregulation.
• There are more than one million people in
  Auckland alone. But how many of them can fit into
  a courtroom to see justice done?

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Public Affairs Reporting

• How many could go to a local council meeting to
  hear discussions that will affect their lives?
• Back to AUT. You dont smoke in the Faculty of
  Arts building or this one because of laws
  preventing you from smoking in public buildings.
• You go outside because this is a public health
  measure designed to keep in check the costs of
  the governments health budget.
• If you own a house your rates are based on its
  value (or that of its land). Water rates are
  separate.
• You will want to know whether rates are going up
  or down.

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Public Affairs Reporting

• Even if you are renting a flat or a house, rates
  will still affect you because your landlord will
  need to pass any increase on to you as tenants.
• When decisions are made about regulations or
  legislation that affect the way that we run our
  lives, we need to know.
• When decisions are made that affect how much
  well be paying in taxes and rates and user
  charges, we need to know.

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Public Affairs Reporting

• This is what public affairs reporting is about
• What do all the decisions, processes,
  regulations, overspending, underspending, mean to
  us the ordinary readers or listeners?
• What does it mean in the places we feel it most
  _ our heart, our health and in the chequebook?
• Public affairs reporting is also important for us
  as journalists because of our important role in a
  democratic society.
• It is through our reporting and our
  investigations that people learn how the country
  is governed.

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Thoughts for the day

• The first rough draft of history
• Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee
• Anything makes a reader say gee whiz!
• American publisher William Randolph Hearst
• When a dog bites a man, thats not news. But if
  a man bites a dog, its news.
• New York Sun city editor John B. Bogart
• News is not what young, well-educated, urban,
  white males judge uninteresting.
• French journalism professor Claude-Jean Bertrand
  (1994)

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Thoughts for the day

• The role of a journalist is to comfort the
  afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
• Introduce course outline