There is no such thing as value-free

 
Column If you write well, you have to adopt and evaluate a point of view. Only bad writers adopt the point of view of the informants and actors. 
Politicians demand it, publishers promise it, media professionals are expected to deliver it - objective journalism. The basic rule is to separate fact from opinion. This is what Anglo-Saxon journalism is supposed to be. The free newspaper .ch recently took it the furthest, claiming to be a value-free news, sports and service newspaper. What a mistake: if you write well, you have to take a standpoint, and that means evaluating. Only bad writers adopt the point of view of the actors or the client, or worse still, they blur the context. For the sake of simplicity, let's remove local details, such as street names and ages.
On the first Sunday in November, the headline of the Winterthur city police's media writer was: Tragic traffic accident. "Tragic" at least sounds dramatic, but after reading the headline, the reader still has no clue. The media officer went on to write: "At two o'clock on Saturday night, there was a traffic accident resulting in death." Did it happen? Just like that? Did the goddesses of fate strike or Hegel's world spirit or a windstorm? The media officer went on to say that a driver was driving in the direction of X. "He overlooked a woman who was crossing the road from left to right on the pedestrian crossing." How does the writer know that the driver "overlooked" the woman? It's also possible that the driver didn't want to slow down out of anger at the pedestrian interfering with his rapid progress, along the lines of: she can run to the side if she wants to. The media spokesperson took the perpetrator's point of view. The victim was unable to say anything more and died four hours later in hospital. "The driver was drunk and behaved so rebelliously at the scene of the accident that he had to be handcuffed."
Interim conclusion: Three important pieces of information - dead pedestrian, driver driving drunk and rioting after the accident - come in passing and only towards the end of the report. It is as if the media spokesperson wants to minimize the blame of those responsible for the accident. As can be seen time and again in police reports.
Three daily newspapers (Landbote, Tages-Anzeiger, NZZ) take over the report of the Winterthur city police and thus the obfuscating basic tone, only the NZZ already mentions the "drunk driver" in the subtitle. But how could the story have been written?
Title: Drunk man kills pedestrian and goes on the rampage. Text: A drunk driver drives into a pedestrian at a crosswalk at two o'clock in the morning. The victim remains unconscious and dies four hours later in hospital. The man who caused the accident defies the police until they put him in handcuffs.
The facts remain, but this time we also name a culprit. A second example: "In a spending spree, more and more people are falling into the debt trap", begins an sda report on the rising number of "private bankruptcies". Value-free reporting? Never heard of the working poor and lack of money in old age, as AHV and pension fund pensions are not enough, especially when a surprise emergency expense is added to the mix? You can easily manage a personal bankruptcy, even without a "spending spree". With his flippant opening sentence, the sda writer reproduces the ideas of those neoliberals who blame the weak for economic failure.
And finally: a glass is fifty point zero percent full. Is it half empty? Or half full?
> Hans Stutz is the former editor-in-chief of the media magazine Klartext and a freelance journalist.