Member-only story
What’s the Narrative, Kenneth? NPR and the Supreme Court
The modern media need to move beyond expected narratives and do actual reporting.
During my senior year of college at Michigan State, I was part of Capital News Service, a program run by the School of Journalism. Students were the reporters at the state capitol for small newspapers around the state of Michigan. I was assigned to a newspaper in a town between Detroit and Toledo.
It was late in the spring, school was nearly out and I needed to get a story out. I thumbed through the press releases that we received from various nonprofits for story ideas and stumbled upon one from the state chapter of the National Rifle Association. I called up the contact person and talked to them about a proposed law they wanted to be passed. It sounded innocuous enough to me, so I chatted with the person and wrote the story, and turned it in.
A few days later I one of the teachers of the class came to me with a gentle chastisement. While the story might have been factually true, I only got the one side of the story from the NRA. With an issue as fraught as gun control, I needed to get another viewpoint on the matter instead of being the unintentional spokesperson for the gun-rights group.
