"Are opinions good in journalism?" Margie Reedy asked an Ex College class Tuesday.
Reedy, a veteran journalist and host of "NewsNight with Margie Reedy" on New England Cable News, discussed her documentary with Professor Roberta Oster-Sachs' class, Producing Films for Social Change.
Her film, "Cable News Goes to War: Is Objectivity a Casualty," examines advocacy journalism and objectivity through press coverage of the Iraq war. She made the film in 2003, while she was a fellow at the Shorenstein School of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.
"The way cable channels were covering the news said a lot about the war, about their journalistic ethics," Reedy said.
The film contrasted the coverage on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, focusing on the objectivity of the images and commentary.
For example, Fox News described the capture of southern Iraq as a liberation, the documentary said, and CNN reported that Iraqis may have felt obligated to welcome American troops.
Reedy presented her film to the same class Sept. 28 last year, just after it was
completed.
The film also included prominent liberal and conservative members of the media. In a heated interview on "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News, Bill O'Reilly said Fox News was "accurate," and denied the station was not objective.
O'Reilly said Fox News' ratings - higher than CNN and MSNBC at the time - showed the station's trustworthiness.
Reedy found the more dramatic format of Fox News and its patriotic stance appealed to many viewers unhappy with the suspicious view of the media toward the government since the Watergate scandal.
The film said cable news is in a "neo-tabloid" era, with the rise in the quantity of broadcast news accompanied by an increase in news with what O'Reilly called a "point of view."
Partisan influences on cable news run the danger of "taking down objectivity, encouraging propaganda and harming democracy," Reedy said.
"I've always been a firm believer that passion is good, but not when it comes to argumentativeness," she said. That can turn journalism into the "bashing of ideological poles," she said.
Students in the class are required to produce their own documentaries, and Reedy gave them advice on how to follow a story. "By the time you get them done, they may be something very different indeed," Reedy said of the students' projects.
