Michael Schmidt, senior investigative journalist, explained the importance of forgetting personal bias and seeing the entire conflict in conflict reporting in a talk Thursday at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
When asked what his advice was for journalists reporting on a conflict they might already have an opinion on, his answer was, "You probably have everything wrong."
Schmidt is a seasoned conflict journalist, having spent time reporting in South Africa, the Sudan and Lebanon. Recently, he has started incorporating photography into his reporting.
Photographing conflict has brought a new idea about conflict into his reporting, he said, and he now better understands the importance of seeing the entire conflict.
He used his time spent reporting in the Solomon Islands as an example of how the media tends to make conflict about race and doesn't focus on what the conflict is actually about. It's important, as a good journalist, he said, to try to really find out what the conflict is about.
He urges reporters to ask themselves, when there is nothing but shouting going on, "Who is benefiting from all the shouting?"
By talking to locals, Schmidt discovered that the conflict in the Solomon Islands was actually over the way land was dealt with. It was not a conflict of race, as other media had reported.
Schmidt said that "conflict is much more than people fighting with one another" and that a reporter must try to capture all of it. He advised journalists to break away from the herd and to go for the counter-intuitive.
Schmidt reminded journalists that "areas that we work in are all borderlands," whether physically or mentally.
"Conflict isn't reserved for the other side of the Earth," he said. A good journalist must be aware of all the conflicts around them and all the nuances within a single conflict.
"The uncomfortable truth is that human beings allow monstrosities to happen," he said. A good journalist should be able to see and report the conflict for what it truly is.
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