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.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Welcome to the Unoriginal History of "Fake News"

There was a time in my life where I wanted to be a journalist. Well, more specifically I wanted to be an investigative journalist. I loved the movie "His Girl Friday" and read as many books in the "Cat Who" series as I could find. Both prominently featured journalists who sought to discover the truth and inform their readers. I thought that reporters often worked with the police, not only to get the latest scoop, but also to help catch the villain in these stories.

Even Disney had a made-for-TV movie that falls in this genre

I used to watch the news all the time as a kid. It was hard not to when so much of the national news took place right in my backyard (that being Washington D.C.). I tried to stay as informed as possible.

As I got older, I began to understand there were types of journalism that were less "Get a Clue" and more "Harriet the Spy". Though journalists can't print anything they want, libel laws don't stop hidden agendas, gossip, and bias from seeping into the stories journalists report on. There have been some graphics of how informative and biased certain news organizations are floating around the internet as of late. I didn't post any graphics here as I wasn't sure about the original source for them.

An interesting take on the pitfalls of spying on your friends and classmates

Needless to say, after doing several research papers on the subject and even studying journalism for a bit in high school, I lost interest. When I went back re-watch "His Girl Friday" and it's predecessor "The Front Page", I also noticed more of the nasty and sometimes unethical things the journalists portrayed would do to get their story. One journalist (and head of his news paper) sort of kidnapped someone so his chance at the big scoop wouldn't be ruined.

(I wrote another blog post on seeing the play "The Front Page" about a year and a half ago. You can click here to read it.)

In high school we learned about yellow journalism (journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration). It was a term coined in the 1890s and was tossed around into early 1900s to describe news papers with misleading headlines, scare tactic stories, and sensational pictures or illustrations of events. Basically what we call click-bait and "fake news" stories today. These tactics could be used to sway the public on different topics and mobilize them into action.

To say that "fake news" and click-bait are new problems for the world of journalists is to disregard that the history of the journalism industry is littered with first person narratives that were meant to incite extreme reactions from readers. The purpose of all stories is to cause an emotional reaction with the reader, even in non-fiction pieces found in new reports.

I've heard some people lament that idea that journalist standards have sunk to a new low in recent years, but I disagree.

Journalism, like most writing platforms, is currently going through the biggest revolution seen since the introduction of the television. People are no longer limited to getting their news from a few local news papers, television stations, or radio programs. We can share information from anywhere in the world in milliseconds. We are more aware of what is going on in the world than ever before.

That's awesome.

But it also leads to new problems. Fact checking still needs to be done and misinformation continues to be spread faster and faster. There's also the emerging problem of bias confirmation and echo chambers that litter social media and forum websites such as Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan. We can't only read and share stories that align with their view points and call people names when they post stories with the opposite view. We might miss out on other view points and facts that could help us better understand the situation.

Journalism and the free press are a right of the American people. It's in the very first amendment to the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It was important to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. It's a right that should continue to be important now.

And anyone can be a journalist. We all have phones in our pockets. We can take pictures, record events, and share them hundreds upon thousands of times on any social media site. Though, that doesn't mean we can take everything at face value. Under every narrative is a grain of truth.

Even my writing isn't without it's narrative bias.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me.

Until next week.