I spent the better part of 35 years as a journalist, so I know bad reporting when I see it. And I’ve been seeing plenty of it lately in the San Francisco Chronicle.
I won’t even reprise my complaints about them giving Cat Brooks pretty much her own weekly space to spew her propaganda, with no opposing viewpoint allowed. Instead, I want to explain how it’s possible for a reporter—who’s supposed to be objective on the issues—to get his spin onto a story. Let us consider the case of Noah Baustin, who had the privilege of being assigned a long article analyzing the Oakland Police Department and its budget.
Baustin posed the question, “Are more police officers the best way to bring down violent crime?” and then proceeded to supply his own opinion as the answer—although he quote-shopped to find someone else to say it.
His story is plagued with problems that J-school graduates are trained to scrupulously avoid. After posing the “Are more police officers…?” question, he writes: “Many researchers agree that hiring more police officers reduces violent crime in a city.” Of course, the implication here is that Baustin interviewed “many researchers,” or has read a ton of published research.
It’s Baustin’s next sentence that has me shaking my head. “But that doesn’t mean Oakland should hire more officers, these experts say.” Okay, now think about it: if you’re the author of this article, you have a choice to make after writing that “hiring more police officers reduces violent crime.” You can follow up that concept by, say, citing statistics from cities where they did hire a lot more police officers and the crime rate plunged. Or you can find cities where they hired a lot more cops and the crime rate soared. Or you can find examples of both, and attempt to analyze the differences. All of these approaches would be consistent with sound journalism.
But Baustin didn’t go any of these routes. Instead, he decided to inject his personal point of view, which is: just because many researchers say that hiring more cops reduces crime, doesn’t make it true in Oakland. Now why would Baustin say that? It could be because he perceives his editors are woke and he wants to suck up to them. It could be because his colleagues in the newsroom are woke cop bashers and he wants them to like him. It could be that Baustin himself doesn’t like cops. Or a combination of all three.
Who are“these experts” who say Oakland shouldn’t hire more cops? Baustin cites a professor of criminology at U.C. Irvine. Just one. You, the reader, might think that, having referred to “experts,” plural, Baustin would offer proof that “many experts” agree that hiring more cops doesn’t necessarily reduce crime. But Baustin doesn’t. The professor he quotes goes on to talk about George Floyd and “police abuses,” when those things are clearly irrelevant to the question of whether hiring more officers results in less crime.
This gets to the heart of what is called quote-shopping. It’s when a reporter knows what he wants to say, but since he can’t say it himself (a journalistic no-no), he shops around until he finds an “expert” to say it for him. And then he pluralizes his “expert” into “experts” to make his reporting sound exhaustive.
This is easy to do, believe me, but it’s really unprofessional. No editor I ever worked for would have allowed me to pull a stunt like that. But the San Francisco Chronicle, I fear, has fallen victim to wokism, in which ideology, not professional norms, dictates work practices.
Steve Heimoff