Dilemmas in Print: A Mishpacha Symposium

GOTCHA JOURNALISM “The frum media doesn’t play gotcha journalism” says Binyamin Rose. “We can’t first of all because we don’t have the research tools the major media outlets do. I’m not Chris Wallace with a team of producers who have tape handy of every public comment the interview source has made so they can throw it back in his face on live TV when they find a discrepancy. Researching a story is similar to preparing a legal case. Like any good attorney you have to be certain of your evidence and 99.9% sure that the person you are interviewing is lying to you now or lied in the past. And if not then you’re going to be nonproductive and will spend a lot of time antagonizing sources. To quote a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review: ‘Reporters ask questions not to get information but to get a reaction. And even with that strategy they rarely succeed.’ ”

R ecent decades have seen a quantitative and qualitative burgeoning of the Torah-observant community in America which in turn has led to a growing engagement with the political business and certain other spheres of the larger American society. At the same time this community has developed a robust journalistic sector featuring numerous daily and weekly newspapers and magazines catering to the entire spectrum of the Orthodox community.

Mishpacha has brought together five prominent figures in the worlds of journalism and communal leadership to address some of the challenges and opportunities that these developments present for the Orthodox world. In considering these issues our panelists were asked to select from several questions and share their thoughts about these modern-day dilemmas

In what ways if any does the role of a frum journalist differ from that of a secular one? What particular strengths and drawbacks does a religious journalist bring to his work?