Welcome to the Merit of Stunt Journalism

Last week, I wrote about yellow journalism and how "fake news" has been around a long time. This week, I want to focus on another type of journalism, one that is both important and controversial.

Before the advent of yellow journalism of the early 1900s, the mid-Victorian era newspapers would use stunt journalism to sell controversial headlines and bring to light stories of the oppressed, underrepresented, and the often forgotten about. Consisting of people immersing themselves in a situation or lifestyle in the attempt to better write a graphic description of the experience, these journalists would dive head first into their assignments to write emotional first person narratives and sway their readers into empathizing with their narrative.

Not to mention some of the best Victorian era stunt journalists were women.

Nellie Bly

One of the most famous stunt journalists (well journalists period) was a woman who went by the pen name Nellie Bly (real name: Elizabeth Jane Cochran). Her most famous story helped lead to changing America's perceptions on how to treat mentally ill people.

Bly agreed to do an undercover expose on the treatment of patients at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in New York. For ten days, Bly pretended to be "insane" (at least by the time's standards) to shed light on the reports of brutality and neglect at the asylum. She described the asylum as "a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out."

Her story went viral.

It directly lead to reforming the asylum and an increase in awareness of what life was like for those who had been committed there. Nearly a month after the story ran, improvements for the patients had been made and a budget increase passed.

She wasn't the only reporter to try to make life better for an underrepresented group of people.

Another stunt reporter, Nell Nelson (real name Helen Cusack) wrote about working conditions in the city of Chicago. Her story brought awareness of the extremely unsafe working conditions for women and girls in factories and raised public sympathy. This lead to new laws being passed favoring workers' rights to humane working conditions and child labor laws.

(You can read more about Nellie Bly by clicking here to see a biography or here for her wiki page. For more on Nell Nelson click here for a description of her work - she's a little harder to find information on).

Today, stunt journalism is known as immersion or immersive journalism.

It's a controversial style to say the least. On the one hand, these journalists are bringing attention to a critical issue which more often than not affects a group of people whom society tends to overlook. On the other, the journalists aren't actually a part of the group being affected overall. At the end of the assignment they get to go back to their regular lives, while the people being written about don't have that luxury.

I first learned about immersive journalism from a subplot from the movie "Get A Clue". In the subplot, there's a homeless man who continues to pop up in relation to a missing teacher. It's first thought that he might be related to the teacher's disappearance since he has the teacher's coat for an unknown reason. It isn't until the climax of the movie that it's learned that the homeless man was actually a journalist posing as a homeless man for a set amount of time to write a story on how homeless people are treated. Also, the reason he has the missing teacher's coat is because the teacher gave it to him.

In case you didn't see last week's post. Here's the Disney Channel Original movie "Get a Clue"

I had mixed feelings on how this subplot was used. On the one hand, the journalist pretending to be homeless helped solve the case of the missing teacher. He helped the kids solve the mystery and gave their story credibility to the authorities.

On the other hand, why didn't the newspaper hire an actual homeless person to tell their story? Clearly there were plenty of homeless people around that they could interview or ask to write the article. Why did someone with no prior experience as a homeless person have to live through the experience to make it creditable?

These are questions I don't have answers to.

I mean I can take a guess that it has to do with money and name recognition. It could be the ridiculous idea that people being pulled from their more mainstream life to experience what a marginalized person or people in extreme danger (such as those in a war zone) are going through somehow gives the story more "credit".

Regardless of the controversy surrounding this style of journalism, these writers are still exposing problems that need to be solved. They are writing these stories to get readers to empathize with those most affected. They are inspiring their readers to seek a solution to a problem, not cover it up.

We need journalists who are willing to go the extra mile to inspire change for the better.

Until next week.

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