The Complex Relationship between Police and Media

When you go to journalism school as most journalists do, a key thing that is taught is who do you trust as a source? Now, what we call a source basically is layman's terms for the person we interview. If I'm a reporter and I talk to you and I want to find out some particular information about the story that I'm trying to write and I'm asking you to provide that information, you are the source of that information. We always say trust our sources, we don't reveal our sources. If we're competing for a story or someone provides us some information anonymously and people ask we does it well, we trust our sources and we don't reveal them or if a source goes on the record, if I'm asking you a question and you say, I'm John Smith from the energy company telling you about energy rates, here's information about that and I write my story and say, "John Smith from the energy company has told me about the rates." You are a source on the record. This is all terminology just to say who are the people that we've interviewed and who are the people that we've talked to. But in recent years, and especially in recent times as of 2020, we've begun a question as an industry, how reliable are some of our sources particularly when it comes to law enforcement police? So as we've seen in 2020, but not just in 2020, in years at this point, getting accurate reliable information from police officers and police agencies and law enforcement, especially when it comes to black deaths that seem very suspicious, getting that accurate information seems to be a challenge sometimes. There could be a video where we see, for complete example here we see an officer just completely railing on someone, beating them upside the head, and all these types of things. But the way we're taught as journalists is we have to get the police officer's side of the story. So we may say in a report that we are write this officer was doing this, but we also have to say, well, why did the officer do this? We have to go back to that law enforcement agency and ask why? That officer may come up with something like this person was resisting arrest, they were doing this, they were doing that. The rules, the ethics that we abide by as journalists is we have to print that. You may have seen in recent years where journalists have been criticized for that practice, because now we have the videos that people are seeing. A lot more body cam footage, a lot more dash cam footage, things like that and what the viewer or the reader may see in the camera footage doesn't always line up with what is being reported in the story. Because again, we're going based off of the ethics that we learned in journalism school or even if we didn't go to journalism school and we learned and we know at the hand of an editor that this is the way we report things. We report based on what the police tells us. We know now that this practice may be flawed, and this is why we as an industry are starting to have these conversations now in terms of do we always trust 100 percent what the police says, particularly when it comes to communities of color. We've seen in many cities at this point that the relationship between police officers and communities of color have been strained. But again, when we as journalists wants to build trust with our communities and our leaders, we sometimes may lean too much on relying on law enforcement to give us information instead of taking a long look a wide shot at the community and seeing that maybe the community has some things to say on this matter as well. What does that mean? Some newsrooms, not all of them, are reevaluating when do you bring the police officer or the police agency in as a source? Do you bring them in right away or how do we approach this? This is a very hard question for our industry. We're not quite sure how to answer this because we are operating on a model that has been practiced for decades if not centuries at this point. The other question is, how quickly will some of these ideas spread? Usually in media the questions or these harder questions start at the top. They start at the larger places like your larger wire agencies or your larger newspapers, and it's in sometimes in some of the larger schools of journalism. But it takes a while for these things to trickle down into midsize markets, smaller markets. If you may be wondering why a large city like New York is talking about this but not as smaller city like [inaudible] , for example, it's because it takes a while for these things to trickle down. Then you may see another incident happen there maybe between a police officer and it's race-related, and it may be reported one way in a larger city because they're having that conversation. But the smaller, the midsize city is still going off of the older rules and the reporting may not be how the reader may accept it. This is a very hard conversation for our industry. I will say that nothing in journalism moves quickly. For example, you may have seen a lot of talk around capitalizing the BM black and capitalizing some of the other races and all that. That conversation has taken place before anybody watching this video was born. We're just now reaching that point where we're starting to capitalize to be in black and people are asking, should we capitalize to black and white, and so on and so forth. Again, asking how trustworthy do we trust the police in sensitive situations? We're not quite there yet, but the conversation is happening and we should have some resolves in the near future. Thank you.