To choose among and to create appropriate narrative and explanatory strategies. To see stories in disparate events and in everyday life. While journalism may be the first draft of history, we shouldn't assume that the first draft of journalism is good enough. George Orwell argues that political abuse leads to language abuse, and vice versa. Such synthesis, they argued, begins with the physical.
Understanding is created initially in journalism through literal and thick description.
Joseph Conrad once wrote that the writer's job is to do the highest possible justice to the visible universe. In order to penetrate and analyze the world of behavior and events, we reach beneath the surface of the visible universe and dip into the domain of the unseen. Psychologists influenced by Freud might say that if the President pursued Monica Lewinsky, it was because he is in an arrested adolescent state. Economists say that speculators in world money markets, noting fluctuations in the value of currencies generally, have been selling Canadian dollars in order to buy U.S. dollars. This, combined with the refusal of the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates and the persistence of the threat of Quebec separatism, keeps the Canadian dollar at an all-time low.