THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505130119
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
One summer evening during my second year in Norfolk I stopped for a red light at Colley Avenue and 26th Street. A woman crossing the street thrust her head through the driver's side window and shouted into my face, ``White bitch!''
And she didn't even know me.
Maybe Dan Richardson, whose letter appears below, would consider that woman clairvoyant. By my editorials he knows me to be mired in the ``worst kind of yellow journalism, the sort designed to inflame racial hatreds.''
Disagreement comes with this territory - editorial pages - I have chosen to occupy these 20 years; derogation, too. Readers are entitled to aim both at me. But a fundamental issue Mr. Richardson raises is timely and goes beyond him and me: Whether somebody's notion of what's a wrongheaded or inflammatory or otherwise illegitimate opinion should be sufficient to squelch it.
I disagree with Mr. Richardson about the city's affirmative-action ordinance and with School Board member Van Spiva about Beach school system priorities, but I don't demand that they either agree with me or shush. Yet Mr. Richardson would hush me up, and in the name of ``public journalism'' yet.
Precisely what ``public journalism'' is, journalists can and do debate. What it isn't, however, is the adherence by a newspaper to any one agenda, to any one band on our nation's broad political spectrum, to any one perspective on our world, or government, or politics or, for that matter, sweet potatoes.
Public journalism, as I fathom it, is an attempt to involve the citizenry in public discourse, public policy and public decision-making, an involvement that entails no litmus tests for entry - or exit.
Guess who first engaged in it on a sizable scale?
Talk radio.
Guess where I first heard of public journalism? Three years ago at a seminar featuring journalists and political scientists fearful that the size of talk radio's audience, its positive reception and the conservatism it reinforced endangered democracy in America. Public journalism was their hope for countering this dangerously divisive trend by a kinder, gentler search for consensus and harmony.
That intent to start the public debate leads news media too often to guide it toward one end or away from another, to choose up sides as we point up issues.
That search for consensus and harmony too frequently fizzles into Joe Cocker Journalism: All feeeeeeliiiiiings, no facts.
Joe Friday Journalism - Just the facts, ma'am - went out with color TV, and cable and videos and all those entertainments with which news media now compete. There's much right about trying to engage feelings and spur discussion. But that ensures dissent, and journalists' job is not to discredit or shush it but to detect what truth lies within. by CNB