By Michael Piwowarski
MIDLAND – “We live at a time where we all believe we have expertise, whether we actually have the expertise or not.”
So said Wesley Lowery, a journalist for the Washington Post, as he addressed Midlanders at the Creative 360 Friday, Jan. 24. The talk was hosted by Central Michigan University, in partnership with the Midland Daily News. Amy Robinson, news director for WCMU Public Media, served as co-host.
When Robinson asked Lowery about the term news literacy, he defined it as the ability to discern trustworthy news sources in a world of partisan leaning media, questionable sources and widespread misinformation.
With the rise of social media, news has been placed within easy reach. It has become easy to not only access but also share news stories with friends and family with just a few taps on a phone.
It is just as easy to come across “fake news.”
“How do we collectively make sure that we are being able to decipher what information we’re receiving?” Lowery asked. “And how are we responsible news sharers and news consumers, […] making sure that we don’t, you know, post the thing that we know isn’t true?”
This is an era where people often think they can do someone else’s job. This applies to journalism; anyone can use basic journalistic functions to report something or share a news story. However, Lowery reminded everyone in attendance that there is more to journalistic integrity than that.
“There is also a journalistic expertise; there are best practices, there are standards, there are ethics,” said Lowery. “There are ways that certain people in the journalism industry at large operate, that your average person just kind of winging it might not.”
Lowery stressed that journalists have a duty to abide by ethical guidelines and to be held accountable to the people they serve.
“I think it’s important that we have a readership that can hold us accountable,” Lowery said. “Sometimes you get things wrong, sometimes we have overlooked context, and I welcome those tweets and emails and those phone calls.”
One takeaway Lowery wanted to leave with the people of Midland is that people can disagree on interpretations of facts, but they are still facts. Having an agreed upon reality is important to having an informed public.
“Having an agreed upon set of facts […] is extremely important for us to begin altering that reality, changing that reality — sustaining the parts of it that we don’t want to change, that we think work.”
Lowery was the lead on the Washington Post’s “Fatal Forces” project, a database started in 2015 which tracked the amount of police shootings that happened across the country. Lowery took on the project after having covered the protests in Ferguson, Missouri in regards to the shooting of Michael Brown by police in 2014.
The federal government’s database had not accounted for every police shooting incident because, as Lowery recalled, several police agencies in states such as Florida didn’t even report them to the federal government.
Drawing on local news reports, police agency reports and social media posts, the Washington Post tracked 993 police shootings by the end of 2015.
“It was stunning to us that, three times every single day in America, someone is shot and killed by a police officer,” said Lowery.
The project won Lowery the Pulitzer Prize for National News Reporting in 2016. The Washington Post still maintains a “Fatal Force” database, which showed 942 victims of police shootings in the year 2019.
