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One problem with third-person reporting is, I don’t write for a national audience, and I don’t much care whether people outside the McCarran Loop find me credible. I’ve been an alternative journalist at this paper for more than 20 years, and people around here either think I have integrity or they don’t. Another problem is that the bureaucrats we journalists cover know how to manipulate media outlets who use this style of reporting. They just say nothing or they make an incredible assertion, so the journalist either doesn’t use the quote, types it like a stenographer, or finds a contradicting voice. The fact is the last option is the best, but journalists work on deadline. In many news outlets, not getting a second side on the record—even if they’re the reticent ones—is enough to quell an article. The third person style is also supposed to prevent the appearance of bias, having the reporter jump in and call baloney in his or her own voice on the ludicrous statements bureaucrats and politicians make as fact. I think maybe this is a holdover from the days when reporters didn’t get bylines in newspapers, so everything was supposed to be attributed to the paper. But for all those reasons, I’m calling baloney.
widely known, not solely because of our efforts, but because the national media picked it up, mainly in light of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri. For example, Lynn Walsh of Scripps Media did this story on Aug. 14: http://bit. ly/1meoGh1 and USA Today did this one on Aug. 15: http://usat.ly/ Vpw2Hn. Even The Daily Show with Jon Stewart weighed in: http://on.cc. com/ZtawDy. By the time folks at the Washington Post or CNN or Al Jazeera had run with the story, it was well-known and well-documented that the Department of Justice was not comprehensively collecting this data. In fact, part of the anger that was fueling the protests across the country was that our government wasn’t concerned enough about the people it kills to determine who they are and why it kills them. It’s difficult for me to imagine a greater arrogance of authoritarian power. There were urgent calls for action by Congress. For example, a Change.org petition “We Demand National Change to Protect Citizens and Communities from Police Violence and Misconduct,” which included the demand, “Ensure transparency, accountability, and safety of our communities, by requiring front-facing cameras on police departments with records of racial disparity in stops, arrest, killings, and excessive force complaints,” garnered more than a quarter-million signatures. And that’s when it happened, on Dec. 10, 2014—the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 passed the
BY THE NUMBERS
“NUMBERSGAME”
OPINION
I
write in the third person when I want news articles to sound credible. This year, I’ve written the first five installments in the Fatal Encouters series—our look at officer-involved homicides— in the third person. It’s the way “respectable” straight journalists write in the national media. It’s the way journalism academics teach students to write. (I once had a master’s level instructor tell me that first-person narratives are forbidden in the AP Stylebook.) When we read or hear the third person voice, our brains are conditioned to react in a certain way.
When 2014 began, it was not widely known that our government does not keep adequate statistics on the people killed by law enforcement. In fact, when our series Fatal Encounters began in February, the first thing other journalists said when we reported that the government didn’t track this information was, “bull.” The lack of data is now
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WRIT TEN BY D.BRIAN BURGHART ILLUSTR ATION BY JONATHAN BUCK DESIGN BY BRIAN BRENEMAN
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NIGHTCLUBS/CASINOS
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THIS WEEK
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MISCELLANY
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DECEMBER 31, 2014
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RN&R
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