How to Use a Newspaper

How to Use a Newspaper If a newspaper stacks up all the facts in a news story, is it fulfilling its responsibility to its readers? Many an editor who likes to call such treatment "objective reporting" thinks it is. The Christian Science Monitor's able Editor Erwin D. Canham thinks it isn't, and last week wound up a six-part, Page One series of articles that told his readers why.

The concept of objective reporting, said he, is basically wrong; the facts need careful interpretation if they are to explain to readers the significance of happenings in the modern world. "Spike" Canham, who has steered the Monitor toward more realistic news coverage by just such stressing of interpretive reporting, explained his philosophy under the headline: HOW TO USE YOUR NEWSPAPER. It was also an important lecture to newsmen on how to edit one.

"Just to print news will not suffice for a modern newspaper," he wrote. "Newspapers must tell the meaning of the news . . . The bare news event can be so misleading as to be false. For example, it is a customary editorial assumption that if an important man says it, it's news. But what if the important man says something that is essentially a lie? . . . It happens nowadays, and not only in Moscow. If we print only the [factual] press association story . . . we are flagrantly misinforming readers. It is not enough to catch up with the lie on the editorial page a day or two later."

To be certain that "the balancing fact" is tacked on to "the misleading assertion," the Monitor prints far more stories from its 81 correspondents and its 2,000-odd special contributors than it does from its three wire services -- A.P., U.P. and Reuters. "We think this [balancing fact] is more important than hasty headlines. So we do not hesitate to hold up a misleading story until we can link with it the necessary fact. Our own correspondents are instructed to do this before they file the story in the first place ... "Rightly carried out, this [interpretive] function need entail no more editorializing than is involved, for example, when an editor decides to print one story and not another. But interpretation requires integrity and knowledge and understanding and balance and detachment . . . News interpretation is all too readily misunderstood. Whenever interpretations differ from the preconceived notions of readers, misunderstanding is likely to creep in. "Objectivity is a very elusive thing. It usually means, to the individual, agreement with his own views . . . This is a problem newspapers can solve in the long run by steadfast news objectivity and honest interpretation. But it sometimes seems to be an uphill road."

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