Writing—More on Nut Grafs

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What is a “nut graf”? Is it an essential component of the well-constructed story?

The short answer is this: The nut graf, coming high in the story (~3rd/4th graf, depending), answers the “So what?” question. After the lead—summary or narrative or whatever—it is a pause as the story gets under way that explains in a tight, focused kernel why the story is important. Does it repeat a summary lead? No. It expands the summary lead “hook” to give the reader the larger picture.

A summary lead might say:

Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama met for the third and final televised debate of their long and hard-fought campaign at Hofstra University Wednesday in an encounter that highlighted their differences on economic issues and someone called “Joe the Plumber.”

The nut graf, coming after a background and possibly a quote graf, would expand that summary to answer reader questions, highlight implications and address the “So what?” question—why does it matter?

Though tough and substantive, the debate apparently did little to change the trajectory toward election day, less than three weeks away, as the Democratic candidate maintains a substantial lead in national polls

For more on Nut Grafs, see these links through the Poynter Institute for Media Studies:

1. The Nut Graf, Part I

2. The Nut Graf and Breaking News

3. The (Sometimes) Superfluous Nut

. . . and this from “No Train, No Gain,” the site for writing coaches:

1. Nut Grafs

2. “So What?” Graphs [sic]

Colbert on Global Warming

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Glacial Horrors in Higher Ed!

Steven Colbert reveals that professors at one Rhode Island college force students to think! Click here for brief video.

Columns—Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas at our Wedding

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Remembering a wedding
and a (continuing) national trial

By Ted Pease
©1997

Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas came to our wedding.

It was an intimate affair, as they say, at a small Vermont inn on an island in the middle of Lake Champlain, 17 years ago today.

It had snowed that morning, then turned to rain, so the skies were gray. Everything else was wet and slushy. Except inside Shore Acres Inn, where Brenda finally made an honest man of me.

There were just seven of us: My sister and her boyfriend were there from Maine. The justice of the peace was the innkeeper/bartender who took off his gloves and Minnesota Twins hat, put down a squash and did the deed. The dogs wanted to come, but they were muddy. Then there was Brenda and me. And in the ether, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill were there, too.

Hill, a law professor from Oklahoma, was accusing Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee, of sexually harassing her when he was her boss at the EEOC. They weren’t really at our wedding, of course, but they were very much present. Come to think of it, so were Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio, and the entire Senate Judiciary Committee.

I am the first to admit that I’m terrible with dates—I have been known to forget my own birthday. It’s not that finally getting Brenda to marry me isn’t the most important event in my life, but without Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, I probably would have a hard time remembering Oct. 12, 1991.

Sexual harassment is not something most of us associate with our wedding anniversary. At least I hope not. But engraved in my memory of the day I got married are the images and sounds of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the voices of now-Justice Thomas, Senators Biden and Kennedy, Specter, Hatch and Simpson, and — most of all — that of a courageous and doomed junior law professor from Oklahoma.

The Hill-Thomas hearings reemerge every time we observe our wedding anniversary.

From Washington came a flurry of live, primetime televised hearings by the all-male, all-white members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a black man nominated by then-President George H. W. Bush to the Supreme Court. A “high-tech lynching” was what Thomas called it, invoking race while deflecting questions over both his qualifications and his conduct.

That morning (Columbus Day, a national holiday honoring a white man who “discovered” America and helped eradicate the native peoples already living here — but that’s another tale), the Thomas hearings were live on TV and radio as we ate breakfast and dressed for our wedding. Distracted by both unfolding dramas, we didn’t talk much; same for many Americans, I guess, 60 percent of whom told pollsters they watched the hearings “closely.”

The story was riveting, and continued on the car radio as we drove to the wedding. When we got there, the innkeeper/JP greeted us at the woodpile, where he’d been chopping kindling. He had headphones in his ears and the Walkman tuned to the same National Public Radio station, which also was on inside, with Sen. Arlen Specter brutally cross-examining Anita Hill as we got ready. They turned off the radio while we got married, but it came back on afterward, amid congratulations, photos, brunch. On the 60-mile drive to Montreal, we held hands, and listened more. High above downtown Montreal, in the honeymoon suite of the grand old hotel le Reine Elizabeth, we opened champagne, put on the fluffy bathrobes, and turned on CNN.

So it is that Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill will forever be part of how I remember my wedding.

A lot of important things happened that weekend, 17 years ago now, and we’re still living with most of them. For me, the most important was marrying Brenda, obviously—a glorious thing. And for all women and men in America, the events surrounding Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to serve a life term on the U.S. Supreme Court still resonate.

Anita Hill put her life—and Clarence Thomas’s—on the line. She didn’t win that fight, but she also didn’t lose: As a result of what she began, women and men across the nation began an uncomfortable but important process of reviewing issues of sexual harassment and sexual power that have been open secrets for too long. One long-term result is the current series of courts martial in the military, where 70 percent of female officers and enlisted have said they have been sexually harassed. Another was a booming commerce in gender books, new life to authors such as Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia, Susan Faludi, Robert Bly and Deborah Tannen, all cashing in on how men and women relate with themselves and each other.

Ironically perhaps, the Hill-Thomas hearings ushered in 1992, called “The Year of the Woman.” In an interview that year, journalist-cum-TV producer Linda Ellerbe told me that she thought three women—Anita Hill, along with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton and Murphy Brown, the TV character who had a well-publicized squabble with Vice President Dan Quayle—had helped start a process that “forced people to rethink their attitudes toward women.” More importantly, Ellerbe said, they “caused women to rethink how we see ourselves.”

“Each of those women,” Ellerbe said, “has through the mass media moved us an inch here or a couple of inches there. Mainly, they did it by being women without apology.”

Today, 17 years after her part in what may have been the most important political dispute between the sexes since suffrage, Anita Hill remains a woman without anything to apologize for. In her book, as in her testimony 17 years ago this weekend, Hill calmly and directly speaks truth to those in power, a courageous example to the rest of us.

Anita, thanks again for the wedding gift. Brenda sends her best.

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This column ran in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal in 1997. ©Ted Pease

Ethics in Campaign Media

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Ethics, Media and Presidential Campaigns

Some useful and interesting links to fuel discussion of how Americans learn about their presidential candidates. Are Jon Stewart viewers more or less informed than viewers/readers of the traditional news media?

“Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?”

“Young adults eschew traditional nightly news for ‘The Daily Show’”

“What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart”

“All politicians are fair game for satirists”

“Obama’s No Joke to Late-Nite TV Comics”

“Media Bash Barack”

“Media Boost Obama, Bash ‘Billary’”

“McCain vs. Obama on the web”

“A First Look at Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign”

“Fact and Fiction on the Campaign Trail”

“Campaign Ad Watch”

“Living Room Candidate”
(past & present campaign ads)

“FactCheck.org” (resources to fact check claims made in candidates’ speeches and political ads)

Column: Press Performance

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A revival meeting for the press

By Ted Pease

The Rev. Jesse Jackson stopped by the convention I attended in Chicago this week to give a little revival meeting—a pep talk on the mass media and American racial and ethnic diversity. He was unhappy with the press, he told a packed hall of journalism professors. Repent! he said. Mend your evil ways!

Jackson, the civil rights leader, former presidential candidate, the founder of the Rainbow Coalition and pulpit-thumping preacher, gave it to us sinners straight.

“Distortions!” he thundered from the ballroom pulpit. “Distortions! Too many stories without history or context, without a sense of character or moral content.”

All week, I have been in meetings, hearing presentations, talking in hallways, submerged and steeped in questions about the practice, politics, research, administration, roles and responsibilities and impact of journalism.

We who practice, study and teach journalism and mass communication think of it as a societal good. Many of us entered this field in the first place to do good. We subscribe as an act of faith to the adage that the press works to right wrongs, expose evils, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. By definition, journalists are the good guys.

But from where Jackson sits — alongside millions of others who are not of “the mainstream” or the privileged classes — that definition is all wrong: For them, journalists are the enemy, working to pull down the powerless and shore up the powerful. In fact, charges the Rev. Jackson, the mass media are the cause of much that is wrong in an increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-misunderstood America.

“Distortion” in the media’s representation of the world is turning us against ourselves, he says: “Distorted words are creating distorted worlds, distorted people. They make us less than we are.”

More context and moral content are needed in America’s press, Jackson said. Where is the media’s moral compass?

Just a day later, Jackson’s views got support from what many might consider an unlikely ally as Allen H. Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, acknowledged many of those criticisms in accepting an award from journalism deans.

“As we all know,” Neuharth said, “evidence abounds that much of the public distrusts and dislikes those in journalism and the reports that they produce.” (Note that he didn’t say “we.”)

Although most Americans say they think the news is “crucial to the functioning of a free society,” Neuharth said, the same poll showed that only 15 percent of us can name the freedoms protected under the First Amendment.

Further, reflecting the kind of frustration that the Rev. Jackson expressed about the trustworthiness of the media, 80 percent of Americans think the news is regularly influenced by outside interests, and, as a result, 65 percent think there are times when the press should be restricted in what it reports.

Distortion!

No wonder more and more Americans — and especially those who are marginalized because of their race, gender or economic conditions — are increasingly cynical about the media. Why not? Increasingly, the press itself seems to have abandoned its legitimate role as a skeptic, watchdog and critic in favor of the role of cynic and pessimist.

“There’s an important distinction between skepticism and cynicism,” points out Neuharth. “Cynics assume the worst, and print it or air it. They think their mission is to indict and convict, rather than to inform and educate.”

The result, he says, is that Americans are left discouraged, disheartened, disappointed, angry and resentful. And it’s no wonder that the resentment spills over on those with poisoned pens who keep bringing the distorted and dreary worldviews into their lives.

“Journalists should tell the truth, not lies,” Jackson told the packed hall of journalism professors. “All the time—not just in a rare special for which you win a prize for telling the truth every now and then.” The Constitution calls on journalists to be “independent scribes of integrity,” he said.

Neuharth agrees, calling for a “new journalism — one that is skeptical and demanding, but is also a chronicle of the good and bad, both the glad and sad, a journalism that provides readers with information they can trust and use to make decisions in their daily lives.

“Whether it’s the new media on the Internet or the print media on your doorstep or the electronic media in your living room, a free press must be a fair press if it is to survive and thrive.”

As the Rev. Jackson might have added, Amen.

(The column first appeared in The Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal in 1997.)

History in Photos

See Rolling Stone here.

50 Years of (primarily U.S.) History in Music and Photos

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then this slideshow by Yee Li is a dissertation, linking references in Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” to photos of the 20th Century news events he lists.

As iconography, pop culture and a selected history in about 5 minutes, this is a fun and effective way to talk with students about the power of icons and how we “know” what we think we know.

Click on this link.

Oxymoron—‘Journalism Ethics’

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Taking the oxymoron out of ‘journalism ethics’

By Ted Pease

When I tell people that I’m teaching media ethics this quarter, some laugh. One colleague was uncharacteristically speechless, as if she couldn’t catch her breath.

I don’t know if it’s the concept of “journalism ethics” that these people find oxymoronic (like “sensitive male”), or if they think it’s funny that I’m the teacher.

Such reactions to the whole idea of ethical journalism reflect a kind of pervasive cynicism — Jimmy Carter might call it “malaise” — that infects the information age and threatens to afflict social institutions far beyond the press and mass media. The reaction is like that of movie viewers who giggle at car crashes and Tarentino shoot-outs: they’d rather laugh than cry.

Those who practice journalism and who study it, however, spend quite a lot of time grappling with ethical issues and the morality play of daily events. (I can hear the giggling now.) There are few professions that require such fine balancing acts and demanding decision-making minute-by-minute and day-to-day.

That is why journalism schools require their students to study ethics and to try to develop from their own values systems ethical yardsticks to help them gauge how they will make decisions in the heat of covering breaking news or creating vehicles to sell a client’s product once they enter the work force.

And so, on Thursday evening, 60 or so students crammed the auditorium in the Animal Science Building on campus to start building ethical yardsticks and taking the measure of their proposed profession. Only one of them commented afterward that it seemed somehow appropriate that we’d be meeting in a room that used to house dairy cows.

One of the things I asked them to do as we got under way was to write down adjectives they associated with the term “journalist” or “reporter.” And, for these students, the results illustrate the kind of schizophrenia that many associated with the journalistic profession carry around.

Some students were already defensive about the field: “unsung heroes,” one woman wrote; “they aren’t recognized for the good they do.” Another listed this string of attributes: “uneducated, sensationalist, nosy, pushy, immoral, idealistic, watch dogs, poorly paid, starving, 1st Amendment-hide behind, unethical.”

Some others: “fact hound, annoying, overbearing, witty, good writer, good thinker”; “talkative, outgoing, friendly, arrogant, obnoxious, nosy, careless, sloppy, busybody, shallow, aggressive, invading, rude, truth-seeking, pry into people’s lives/business, self-righteous, liberal, too honest/dishonest.”

On of my favorite lists, from a junior, included “writer, searcher, destroyer, pressure, fairness, accuracy, balance, busy, stress, anxiety, time pressure, no family life, no friends.”

Such mixed emotions about journalism are an artifact of changing attitudes toward the field, and toward the role of the press and the mass media. And it is not surprising that students considering careers in these fields feel so ambivalent. The press is often its own worst enemy.

Consider just a few recent examples: ABC News’ use of hidden cameras in the Food Lion case. The media spectacle surrounding the murder of “tiny beauty queen” JonBenet Ramsey. The Ennis Cosby murder. The Dallas Morning News’ unprecedented scooping of itself by publishing Timothy McVeigh’s “confession” to the Oklahoma City bombing on the Internet just hours before the newspaper itself hit the streets. And let’s not even murmur the dreadful initials “OJ.”
Gregory Kane, writing for the Baltimore Sun, recently observed, “Somewhere along the line, many Americans relegated the media to a notch on the morality scale only slightly above that of child molesters. Judging by the way some media have covered the murder of Ennis Cosby, we deserve it.”

Substitute for the Cosby case almost any other sensational news event, and the assessment is sadly the same.

A day or so after the Dallas Morning News reported that Timothy McVeigh had confessed to bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City during the day in order to get everyone’s attention with a high body count, I was having lunch with some journalists. This group, whose newsroom experience ranged from six to 18 years, was horrified by the newspaper’s “scoop” and the cynical way it reported the story — electronically scooping itself on the Internet to avoid an almost-certain court injunction against reporting the alleged “confession.”

I wish non-journalists could hear these kinds of conversations that reporters and editors have every day, agonizing over what they know and what they can and should tell their readers and viewers.

“I believe journalists are intelligent, thoughtful, well-educated and generally motivated by a sense of fairness,” a copy editor friend once said during one of these kinds of discussions. “Reporting is honest, wonderfully creative work that forces people to be engaged in their world and communities. Few fields place an equal premium on truth, honesty and fairness.”

But, like my ethics students, most Americans don’t hear these kinds of conversations, and see only the most sensationalistic results of journalism, the kinds of stories and practices that make most in the profession cringe.

So it is no surprise that the students in my media ethics class feel a little schizy, sheepish, even apologetic, about their prospective careers. “I think that no matter what, behind a journalist’s values and motivations is a sense of greed,” one student wrote in response to a question about what journalists value. “The average person who seeks truth does it for truth itself, while a journalist seeks it for his career.”

What’s at stake in this conversation is not just the development of ethical yardsticks for future journalists, but the larger impact such attitudes toward the press have on the larger society and its other institutions. Cynicism about the press and mass media, and how they portray events, inevitably spawns wider cynicism and disengagement in society, a loss of community involvement.

Over the next 10 weeks, on Thursday evenings, 60 students and I will grapple with these issues and try to take the oxymoron out of “journalism ethics,” and restore some of the sense of mission and commitment to do good that led many of us into journalism in the first place. Stay tuned.

(This column first appeared in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal on 3/30/97.)