Journalism and Democracy

I'm late because this is hard

2007-04-28T22:07:00.000-06:00

Talking about the Iraq War makes me angry.

I don't hate the war, per se. I could care less about the war. We went over there, unprovoked, sure, but we did a good thing in getting rid of Saddam. He killed men -- then charged the family thousands of dollars for the bullet used to do it. He and his sons raped and killed, then punished anyone who talked about it. At that point, we had done something that made the world better.

I just hate that we can't cover the war without being crucified as pushing a liberal agenda. Things are bad. Truthfully, objectively, honestly, things are bad. "The good things" that are happening over there are few and far between, and no one -- Iraqi or otherwise -- can get too excited about clean water or a friggin' playground when it's offset by the rape of a 14-year-old and the murder of her family. Or an Abu Ghraib. Or any story with a lead like this: "Cpl Donald Payne, 35, of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment, pleaded guilty to the charge at the start of a court martial of seven British soldiers accused of beating and killing Baha Musa, an Iraqi hotel receptionist, while he was held by UK troops in Basra in September 2003."

In my humble opinion, that's on par with a taped beheading. Hell, maybe even worse: at least the guys doing he beheading were making a statement; our guys are just sadistic for the fun of it. But that's neither here nor there...

I hate that the idea of a liberal media bias is so ingrained that people ignore blatant attempts to skew the news the other way. I hate that whatever people choose to believe about the war, they can continue to do so because they can choose who gives them their "news" based on their war views.

It makes what we do inconsequential. Completely inconsequential. The only thing we can do that won't immediately get politicized and spun is the daily numbers report. Oh, wait. We can't do that. Running the numbers of American dead is only delivering the bad news, and that is unacceptable.

The worst part about it is that I see no end. The information explosion has required a way to filter through it, and a political filter is one popular option the media has embraced. It's easy to throw out words we've learned in school: "only run it if it's balanced!" "only show the objective stuff!" But it's much more complicated than that. Do you run one "good" story for every "bad"? What counts as good? What's bad? Maybe we even have a sliding scale -- one troop homecoming equals one car bombing, or some such, whereas the story quoted above requires seventeen elementary school openings to balance it out.

Maybe we take another approach, with each news agency sending two reporters -- one to cover exclusively bad news, and one to cover exclusively good.

Genius. If we take that approach, we'll be back to the good ol' days before we know it. I promise.

No... there is no going back. We're here now. And we're going to be here for a looong time.

I have no interest in war coverage, or even political coverage, for exactly this reason. I don't want to cover anything where the truth is biased.

The truth is something that doesn't require balance; balance comes in when the truth isn't clear.

Covering Tragedy

2007-04-24T23:17:00.000-06:00

Shortly after I learned of the Virginia Tech shootings, I got a random IM on AOL Instant Messanger while watching the news. It was from a girl from a message board I sometimes post on. I had never talked to her, and she really didn't know anything about me. After a short conversation, I mention the shootings. Her immediate response is something along the lines of, "Now we get to watch the media turn it into a circus, that's the saddest thing." She probably felt a little stupid when I later told her I was a journalism major, but in reality, I can't really argue with her.

The three cable news networks, especially, basically treat real-life tragedies as if they were a movie. They create villains---the criticism of the administration immediately before the facts were even known, was sickening. Sure, they probably did deserve to have some questions asked of them, but there’s only one person who deserves to be treated like a monster in this situation. They create heroes, as well, out of those who hold doors closed and risk their own lives to help others. These stories should absolutely be told, but the dramatization of them for strictly entertainment purposes, is wrong.

That said, I have a hard time criticizing anyone who can cover tragedy on the spot, simply because I don’t know if I could do it. I have a hard enough time watching horrific events unfold from the comfort of my own home without getting emotional, and as much as I like to think that I would be able to pull myself together for the sake of journalism, I really am confident that I could do.

While watching the coverage, I was most amazed when members of the Virginia Tech student newspaper were interviewed. The editor of the paper appeared completely unshaken. She spoke of what was going on calmly, and even seemed to revel in the moment somewhat. That blew me away. If something like this happened at Mizzou, I would be a wreck. I can’t imagine not being. It’s hard enough for outsiders to cover tragedy, let alone those that close to her. This isn’t a criticism of her humanity though, but a tip of my cap to her. We need people like that. Someone has to be there to stay composed when the rest of us are shaken, and someone has to tell us the stories we need to hear. These news networks do it, and they do it well.

The competition amongst various news outlets is intense when it comes to breaking news, and there’s no denying the fact that networks have to consider ratings and other aspects of the business side of things. They have to make things interesting to keep viewers from changing the channels. I understand this, and others outside of journalism need to, also. Still, there’s a fine line between making news interesting and making light out of things. Tragedies like the Virginia Tech shootings should be treated as what they are, absolutely horrific and heartbreakingly sad events. They should be mourned, not used as an advertisement for why viewers should tune in. All the commercials I saw on news networks the night after the shooting telling viewers to “Tune in to our show tomorrow night for the latest on the Virginia Tech massacre!” made me sick. People know what happened, they know the news networks will have coverage of them. There’s no need to try to exploit tragedy to attract attention to your show.

The same can be said about coverage of the war in Iraq. By this point, it is completely taken for granted, and it doesn’t even seem to be major news when troops or civilians are killed. It seems the only time we hear much about the war is when a news network wants to promote a show they have coming up that will talk about it. Oh, and slightly off topic, as much as I dislike our current president and administration, Keith Olberman opening and closing his show every night by saying it’s the such and such night since the declaration of “missing accomplished” in Iraq is ridiculous. It’s one thing to criticize a president, but to make light of the fact that people are getting killed every day and to turn it into a joke that we’re still involved in this stupid war, is horrible. Then again, humor might make people watch. After all, isn’t that all that matters?

Bring back the fair, unbiased coverage

2007-04-24T10:51:00.000-06:00

The April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech were, statistically, the worst campus shootings in United States history.

Newspapers, as usual, were right on the scene. But they had several questions to ask themselves. Reporters considered what angles to focus on. Photographers considered what photos to use – an even more difficult decision once the “military-style” photos of the gunman surfaced. Designers had to find a way to arrange the copy. And managers were in the background, supervising it all. Overall, I think they did a good job.

Newspapers all over did their best to inform their readers what had happened and keep them abreast of new developments. Those in or near college towns also answered another question many had: “what if this happened here? Would we be prepared?”

I was in Southeast Missouri when the shootings occurred, on a weeklong internship at the Southeast Missouri newspaper for another class which I’m enrolled in. I first saw the update on the Internet, and then was glued to Web and television updates until I had to leave for my copy desk shift. At the newspaper’s afternoon budget meeting, there was no question that the article on the shooting would be the centerpiece that day – a decision that was made partially because of a lack of other good art, but more so, I believe, because it was the big, breaking news. We only hoped that we could use a draft of the story that would advance what readers had already read and heard. Since the paper is located just a couple of miles from Southeast Missouri State University, we also ran a local sidebar with information from the college about its preparedness for a similar accident on its campus.

Newspaper designs varied. One of the most touching designs I saw was that at the Virginian-Pilot. The front had a memorial ribbon in Virginia Tech colors, and then simply listed the names, ages and a small blurb of information about each of the victims. All of the newspapers on Newseum gave a reverent feel to the design the day after the massacre. It was later in the week, when the video sent to NBC by the shooter surfaced, that newspapers had tough questions to deal with. An overwhelming number of newspapers on Newseum used one of the shots – either with the guns pointed to the side or straightforward – as their main art. Some tabloid-style papers used the photo as the entire cover. The Columbia Missourian used neither. Granted, there was a fatal shooting in Columbia on the same news cycle. But I think the decision not to run the photos – especially on the front – would have stood regardless of this other news. In Friday’s design critique, we discussed the photos. And the class of designers overwhelmingly agreed that those photos have no place in a family newspaper. They can invoke a sense of fear. Those pictures very easily bring about questions from children that parents most likely don’t want to have to explain. We were all comfortable with giving a Web site where the photos could be found for those interested, since they were splashed all over the Web.

In the beginning of the Iraq War, journalists practiced the same characteristics I just pointed out that have been in the media coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings over the past week. They were reverent. They covered the war from several angles.

But those attributes aren’t so apparent anymore. Lost are the reverence and balanced coverage on the good and the bad in Iraq. At the beginning of the war, I would read every story in the New York Times headlines that were e-mailed to me every morning. I rarely read these stories in their entirety anymore. They are too similar to one another and often show a bias against the war – reporting the now-higher death toll or recent violence. I think these things are important to report. But why not show what is being done in Iraq to make it better? Show the good things the soldiers are doing and accomplishing.

The managing editor at the newspaper where I will work after graduation lost her son in Iraq last October. For many like her, covering the Iraq War as if it is just a big mistake makes it even harder for these grieving families. They’re basically being told that their son, husband, dad, brother or loved one died in a pointless war – that they died for no reason at all. But it was something the soldiers did believe in. I know that’s what gave the managing editor comfort – that at least her son died doing something he believed in and wanted to do since he was a small child.

I charge journalists, especially those in our graduating class who are about to enter the industry, to change this. Bring back those characteristics we saw in the beginning of the war and in the Virginia Tech shootings. We owe it to ourselves and our readership to be fair and balanced – because that is the basis of journalism.

I Get Lost In An Array of Numbers and Can We Stop Playing the Blame Game

2007-04-24T06:47:00.000-06:00

I’m a journalist. I consider myself to be pretty educated. I love reading and I especially love reading newspapers—something I do on a daily basis. But if someone asked me to explain what is really going on in the Iraq war, I feel as though I would not be able to offer anything substantial to the table. Why is that?

I get the New York Times sent to my email every morning. I scan through the stories, and everyday there is a story on Iraq. I read the story in its entirety if I have time, but if I’m pressed for time the other stories usually get priority over the daily Iraq story. Why? Because I feel like I get pretty much the same thing every day. This might sound incredibly insensitive but it’s just a different name and a different bombsite. This is not to say that I do not feel honored that these women and men are fighting for my freedom in Iraq or that I do not feel sympathy for their family and friends upon their death. However, the media has not done a good enough job relaying the Iraq war to the public. The daily stories get turned into more of a numbers game. “The death toll rose to xxxxxx today”. I need more.

I need stories beyond the numbers. I want stories about the soldiers who are dying, stories about the soldiers’ daily life in Iraq, stories about the good things that are happening in Iraq (I know there have to be some things), and I want more stories on the Iraqis living through this war.

I get a similar feeling when I read about Darfur. “XX million people have been displaced and xx people have died”. After a while statements like those lose their meanings. New York Times columnist Nick Kristof has provided the public with more. He has been committed to bringing the public the full story about Darfur. However, he faces another barrier- fighting America’s indifference to the outside world- especially to Africa. At least Iraq has American soldiers on its soil because if it didn’t, I’m not sure if Americans would care that much.

On a slightly different note- I wish the media would stop playing the blame game. I know its human nature to want to point a finger especially when there is a tragedy or a controversial topic. But what is the point of pointing fingers about the Iraq war? What is the point for searching for the justification? We entered this war four years ago- let’s focus on the present and not so much on the past. What’s done is done and now as a nation we have to deal with the fact that our countrymen are over in Iraq fighting with no end date necessarily in site.

A similar thing happened with the VA Tech shootings last week. It wasn’t but a few hours after the incident that people started pointing fingers. I can understand parents being angry and wanting to point fingers at the chancellor. That’s human nature. But is that supposed to be the nature of the media? If it’s a way of trying to prevent future incidents like this from happening, that’s one thing, but to attack the man only hours after the most violent school shooting is not good journalism.

The war deserves coverage too

2007-04-24T01:24:00.000-06:00

During the day of the shootings at Virginia Tech, I spent a good part of the day watching news coverage like many other people. I was shocked and frightened trying to understand what had just happened. But of everything I watched and heard that day on television, one anecdote really stuck in my mind and made me think. A Virginia Tech student was being interviewed and he spoke about how his friend fighting in Iraq, called him to see if he was okay. How ironic is that? One person is off experiencing war first-hand every day, yet he has to call a friend thousands of miles away just to see if he’s alive?

This student’s story emphasized how sad and significant this senseless tragedy was, but it also made me think about how much coverage the media budgets to tragedies and deaths like at Virginia Tech and how little the media allocates to the War in Iraq. For example, according to Reuters, at least 82 non-insurgents were killed or had their bodies found in Iraq the same day as the Virginia Tech shootings. This story, however, received no media coverage that day while coverage of the shooting was replayed over and over with little new information coming in. By no means am I trying to downplay the tragedy at Virginia Tech. This was the worst shooting in U.S. history and a story that no one will likely forget. It deserved the large magnitude of coverage that it received. In Iraq, however, massacres occur every day, yet it consistently receives little media coverage other than reporting death tolls. My point is that at least 82 people died at war thousands of miles away and that story deserved coverage too. The media attention given to the Virginia Tech shootings just shows that most of the American people forget that bigger massacres are happening every day around the world.

It’s pretty easy to understand why something like the Virginia Tech shootings receives so much media coverage, while the War in Iraq does not. To put it bluntly, school shootings do not happen every day (especially of this magnitude) while people are going to die every day in a war. One is a shock, the other is expected. The media devoted days of straight Virginia Tech coverage because that’s simply what the American people wanted to know about. In fact, if a news outlet had anything else on television, it’s likely people would have changed the channel to coverage of the shootings.

But, the coverage allocated to events on the day of the Virginia Tech shootings doesn’t bother me as much as the way the War in Iraq is generally reported. Most Americans aren’t just that concerned with international news. I don’t think that comes as a surprise to anyone. But are they not concerned because it doesn’t interest them or are they not concerned because the media doesn’t present it enough or in a way to make people concerned? Would people be more concerned and aware of the war of the media reported it more in-depth? No one can answer these questions for sure, but I think they are important to consider. We’ve learned that part of a journalist’s role is to act a watchdog and decide what the public needs to know. But in this watchdog role, it always seems like the journalists (especially the TV ones) are just focusing on the bombings and the deaths in Iraq without presenting much more than that. Why can’t we have more positive stories about the soldiers risking their lives for our country, for example? It’s the journalists’ job to inform the public of what’s happening and what’s important and there are other stories happening than bombings and death tolls.

Massacres happen all over the world, but until it happens inside your little bubble, the weight doesn’t really sink in. The Virginia Tech tragedy was absolutely horrible. But, hopefully people will realize from this that all life is precious, and have similar reactions to some of the violence going on in the rest of the world. After all, it’s up to the journalists to help get them there.

Sports are important, but...

2007-04-23T23:47:00.000-06:00

When I first heard about what happened at Virginia Tech, I think my initial reactions were probably pretty common.

The feelings of shock and sadness were some of the strongest I have felt in my entire life. Part of me wondered what it was like to have a friend, or multiple friends, murdered on that day, and how I would have reacted. I also wondered what I would have done if I were confronted with that situation. Would I have tried to run away from the shooter, or would I have attempted to foil him, knowing it may have meant my death? Hopefully, I will never know for sure.

Being a journalist, my mind then wandered over to how the media was covering the event. Among my criticisms were the words used to describe the day. “Massacre” and “Slaughter” were two of the words used and those made me feel uncomfortable. For some reason, many networks and news organizations chose to over-dramatize the day’s events by using these sensationalistic and insensitive words. Isn’t “32 murdered at Virginia Tech” enough, I wondered?

Over the next couple of days following the shooting, I tried to escape the coverage as best I could. CNN.com and CHICAGOTRIBUNE.com were two sites I didn’t visit. I didn’t want to know the details too well, because, frankly, they were too disturbing for me. I didn’t want to think about the horror of the event. And if that kept me from being as well-informed as I could have been, so be it. Besides, much of the information found a way of trickling to me whether I wanted it to or not. I know that the e-mail system at Tech may be flawed and that the university was not locked down as it should have been.

To escape from what happened, I do what I do often. I went to ESPN.com and tried to read as much as I could about sports. On that Monday, I wondered aloud when would the first stories about Virginia Tech sports come out. And, of course, they came out that very day. Football coach Frank Beamer said it was a terrible day for the university, and his basketball counterpart, Seth Greenberg, said the same. My reaction to that was twofold. The first was: Duh. Of course they are going to say something like this. It would only have been newsworthy if one of them had come out and said something like “Gee, this wasn’t as bad as it sounds” or something like that.

But the second, and more serious, reaction I felt was that sports was being injected into a story where it didn’t belong, and I had seen this before. During the 2006 football season, the New Orleans Saints were being portrayed as an inspirational group uniting the entire Gulf region. Some said they were giving hope to the area. Whatever. All I know is that not too many of the people that were at those Saints games this season were from the 9th ward, people who lost everything. Saying the Saints were giving Gulf residents an escape is fine. But that’s all the Saints were doing. And if I remember correctly, they were not the best supported team before the hurricane. They were always one of the teams mentioned to take the vacant LA football market, and not stay in New Orleans.

Later in the week, ESPN and NBC made a big deal of Virginia Tech’s first baseball game since the tragedy. When I think of Virginia Tech athletics, I do not think of baseball first or even second. The school is lacking a baseball tradition so much that it has only one obscure player in the majors. Still, when the Hokies lost 11-9 to Miami on Friday, it was described as an evening that “began the healing process” and a “return to normalcy”. Sure. If that’s true, that’s great. However, I doubt that a team that is miles behind the football and basketball programs (in terms of popularity) at the school is really doing that.

I just don’t think that sports should be portrayed as this great healer in our society. Yes, they can provide great excitement and stimulate some of our deepest passions. But only for a couple hours. The real healing and return to a somewhat-normal life at Tech starts with each student dealing with the tragedy in their own way. And I'm betting it wasn't from some college baseball game like ESPN told us.

Tell Me Something I Don't Know

2007-04-23T22:55:00.000-06:00

When Mr. Weiss wanted to watch the news, he watched Fox News.

It was a predictable action for my then-boyfriend’s father. Mr. Weiss, a 1st Class Staff Sergeant, had retired from the U.S. Army after 25 years of service. He then got a job testing weapons and other gadgets for a group that contracted with the military. He would spend several weekends a year reporting to military groups in Washington D.C. about the findings of the tests.

Mr. Weiss’ oldest son had spent a tour in Afghanistan and Iraq as a member of the Marine Corps. He was sent home after sustaining minor injuries from a land mine.

The Iraq War was personal to the Weiss family.

Because I spent so much time at his home and was studying to be a part of the “damned liberal media,” I became the representative scapegoat Mr. Weiss would voice the complaints he had against all reporters who didn’t work for Fox News.

I can debate with the best of them. Even if I don’t know what I am talking about, I can usually put up a good front and make you mad as hell. But when it came to Mr. Weiss and media coverage, my very own specialty, I was cowed.

He was right.

CNN and the newspapers never report the positive things going on in the Middle East, he would say. What about the schools and the water treatment plants the soldiers are building? What about the children? What about….

At the time, I just took it all in and battled where I could. After all, the J-School was telling me Fox was nearly the Antichrist. Surely I couldn’t side with that news organization.

The Iraq War is one of the hottest and most unpopular topics in America right now and it is largely under reported. Dozens of media outlets cite safety as the No. 1 reason for lack of information; it is simply too dangerous to send reporters to the country and expect them to get accurate information. “The media’s vital role as eyewitness has been severely limited; the intimate narrative of victims, survivors and their persecutors is sorely lacking in places like Anbar Province, where the insurgency continues to inflict havoc” (Ricchiardi, 28).

A sorely lacking, intimate narrative in just Anbar Province? I have yet to see an intimate narrative about the goings-on of the Iraq War on anything, anywhere. Maybe you have. But I haven’t.

The journalists that are embedded and reporting for the world public are focusing on the life of the country, or rather the death. The American Journalism Review complains that while journalists are left to sift through the propaganda and challenges, “…Americans are left without a complete account of a prolonged, bloody war that is devouring billions of taxpayers’ dollars.”

I believe the American public has a pretty good idea about the length and bloodiness of the war. Unfortunately, that’s the only picture they have.

In a March 2006 PBS program through the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer called “The Media and the Message,” the moderator discussed the issue of good news vs. bad news with two reputable sources. Robert Lichter, a journalism professor and president for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Michael Massing, the former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, both agreed that what the media reports, is what the public sees.

The public doesn’t know anything but what we as journalists show them. If all we show them is death and destruction in Iraq, then that is of course what they are going to know and believe. President Bush even spoke about the terrorist manipulation of essentially distracting the media by blowing things up and wreaking havoc.

“If it’s a disservice to the American public, using the traditional criteria for news, to miss other things that are happening; I can’t be sure they are happening because I don't see them in the media,” Lichter said.

Granted, no place in Iraq is going to be a safe place for a journalist. But there are 18 total provinces in Iraq, and I know some of them have been designated as more secure than others.

There are stories to be told in Iraq; and they are tellable.

So children are scared to go to school? It’s interesting that one of the jobs of Americans in Iraq is to build schools where there were none at all.

So Americans in the Middle East are building water treatment facilities? Those had to come before plumbing and pipes could be installed — where there were none at all.

So there are heroes in this war? We wouldn’t know it if we had to rely on the media.

What about the mothers? What about the children? What about the soldiers? What about Baghdad, a former cultural hotspot of the world? Think of the troves of art that are lost. What about Hussein’s coffers of treasures? Are they gone? Looted?

And how about one of Yahoo’s latest Iraq stories? Buried at the bottom was the announcement of thousands of gallons of nitric acid found in a hidden weapons stockpile. It may not be WMDs, but ask Mr. Weiss what else the soldiers have found that the media doesn’t talk about.

Mr. Weiss could share stories that would make your heart truly ache. The stories were of soldiers doing their duty in a foreign country to a population of foreign people. He worked alongside the parents of currently deployed soldiers and among the soldiers themselves.

Those are the stories I want to hear. And if Mr. Weiss can know about them all the way here in Missouri, then I don’t understand why our reporters can’t find them, as well.

Sources:
PBS program transcript:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june06/iraq_3-22.html#

Ricchiardi, Sherry. American Journalism Review. “Obstructed View.” April/May 2007, p. 26-33.

Blogs ftw

2007-04-23T22:33:00.000-06:00

The comparisons to Columbine are inevitable. The words “Virginia Tech” are going to mean something to this generation. That meaning would be totally unique if we hadn’t had Columbine first. We may go down in history as the school shooting generation. We haven’t outgrown school violence. I wonder if there will be office place shootings when we are in our 30s.
One difference between Columbine and Virginia Tech for me was the complete ease in getting information this time around.
I first heard about it while we were sitting in this class, last week. An hour and fifteen minutes I met friends for lunch and pulled out my laptop, proud to be the first one to tell them what was going on. Before we separated for our respective classes we had the most up to date death toll, thought the gunman had been shot by police, knew that he was Asian and had watched the cell phone video three times. By the end of my next class I had witnessed the real-time online drama of the “gunman’s blog.” It only took a couple of hours for him to post that he has not the shooter.
By the next day I found myself arguing with my friend over the ethics of facebooking the dead, then doing it anyway. We had both already facebooked the killer, there was no debate there. That afternoon I read the first screenplay, a few hours later the second surfaced. That night I downloaded three studio-quality Virginia Tech tributes by various artists. They must have run to the studio to put them out so fast.
The interesting thing was the last place I always looked was a news organization’s Web site. I went to a blog, then to facebook, then a music sharing blog, back to blogs, most guiltily - to Wikipedia. The only time I looked at The New York Times or CNN.com was to see the death toll. That’s what I perceived the newspaper and cable news network to be best for. They weren’t reporting the hoax, facebook messages, or anything else I really wanted to see. In the next few days I would look to newspapers for information on the killer and victims, but it was mostly stuff I had heard before. I had to chuckle a little at an article in the New York Times discussing the online explosion of information surrounding the shooting. It covered everything I had already seen, the hoax, the screenplays, his “manifesto,” and a Wikipedia entry that could have put every journalist in America out of business. It was a well-written and interesting article, but it was 4 days late. The NBC editorial debate was an interesting juxtaposition to the blogosphere. Out in the ether of the people’s medium, every scrape of information was instantly available, with commentary and affiliate links. And all this was happening while NBC wondered how much information we, the public, could handle about Cho. I was so disappointed to visit nbc.com and find some measly “excerpt” and pixilated cuss-words. I felt like my quest for information had been halted – by journalists. I longed for bloggers who put it all out there and didn’t wonder what I could handle.
Maybe the “office place shooters” of the future will know to send their manifestos to The Smoking Gun or PostSecret.

Managing public perception, managing the media

2007-04-23T22:20:00.000-06:00

Companies all over the world hire public relations firms to manage their corporate communications. Even small businesses have some kind of a spokesperson. But for some reason, I found it surprising that the U.S. Army has had contracts out for groups to handle public relations for the Iraq War.

It makes senses that companies with agendas, businesses that sell things and groups that disseminate a specific message to the public would need someone controlling the perception of that message. But the fact that this also is being done with the Iraq War is kind of scary, especially for the journalists charged with cutting through that to get the truth.

A Washington Post Article, written by Walter Pincus in August 2006 discussed a $20 million bid from U.S. military leaders in Baghdad “that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq.”

The article goes on to say that the Bush administration didn’t like what the media was saying about the war. Therefore, the bid called for monitors, who would “analyze stories to determine the dissemination of key themes and messages along with whether the "tone" is positive, neutral or negative.

Journalists are taught that it is their job to get the news and report information in a way that provides people with the tools needed to make their own decisions regarding the “tone” of a story. Journalists face a daily struggle in trying to keep biases out of their stories and maintain some objectivity so as not to mislead readers. But when the only information journalists can get to is already full of biases and has been managed and monitored to the point that the true news of the story is lost, it seems like reporters have few options.

The Washington Post story also said that a public relations firm, the Rendon Group, at the time, held a year-to-year contract with the military command in Iraq.

James Bamford profiled the head of the group, John Rendon, for a Rolling Stone article in 2005, titled “The Man Who Sold the War.” With all the pro-war stories run in Rolling Stone, an article that takes a scathing look at the propaganda that sold the Iraq War is quite surprising.

But however left leaning the story may be, it raises some interesting questions about what the media can do when there is someone like Rendon who could be doing anything from managing the dissemination of information to flat out lying. It’s certainly admirable of those reporters who refuse to accept that and will do whatever necessary, likely in the case of the Iraq War, risk their lives, to get the truth. But with few journalists like that working today and an increasing number becoming discouraged by the fight they are up against, accurate coverage of the Iraq War is suffering.

Bamford quoted a speech Rendon gave at the U.S. Air Force Academy. “I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.”

These seem like several contradicting jobs. When a politician involved with the Iraq War also is working to get highly-designed messages out to the public about that war, there are going to be some problems with what information the media have access to.

As for Rendon being an information warrior, I’m not really sure what that is. But it sounds like something that should be left up to journalists. Whether it means fighting for accurate information or fighting to get the information out to the public, it doesn’t seem like someone such as Rendon, trained to manipulate information, should be the one to be doing the fighting. As for him being a perception manager – well, I never thought perceptions were supposed to be managed.

On top of all of this, the U.S. military contract that was awarded in 2006 went to the Lincoln Group, “a public relations company known for its role in a controversial U.S. military program that paid Iraqi newspapers for stories favorable to coalition forces,” according to a story from USA Today.

So the saga continues. While journalists may be partially to blame for less than thorough coverage of the war, it’s difficult to see many options reporters have when the U.S. government continues to practice tactics that prevent reporters from doing their jobs.

The thinking inside the box

2007-04-23T21:39:00.000-06:00

By Stephen Nellis

I take a sort of pride in not owning a television. Last week reminded me why.

Between murders at Virginia Tech on April 16, Cho Seung-Hui paused to mail off a package to NBC. It contained a multimedia manifesto.

But that’s puffing Cho’s video up a bit. It was really just the ramblings of a profoundly disturbed young man, a young man who sought to pin the blame for his rage on anyone or anything other than himself. No point, no value, no insight. Just adolescent sociopathology mixed with semi-automatic weapons and nothing to lose.

The only meaningful thing Cho’s package told us was that he wanted to be heard. And we can infer from his decision to mail his rant to NBC – a major network – that he wanted a large audience. He wanted a media spectacle, wall-to-wall coverage, all-Cho-all-the-time. In short, he wanted a national tragedy with his face on it.

And Mr. Cho got what he wanted. First NBC, and then other networks, aired the “Cho Show” on continuous loop beginning around 6 p.m. Wednesday of last week. The next morning, newspapers across the country ran still images taken from the video, mostly of Cho posing with his pistols pointed either at the camera or himself. Did you notice the nifty NBC logo in the corner of so many of those still images in the newspapers? Call it branding, I suppose.

Thank goodness for NBC. Now, each and every one of us who saw the images knows what it looked like to stare down the barrel of Cho’s pistol. And the families of those who died could see exactly what their loved ones might have seen before they were shot and killed. Boy, I bet those folks were thrilled.

I’m nonplussed at why NBC decided to air the footage or why newspapers decided to run images taken from it. Was it not incredibly obvious that having his rant slathered across airwaves and headlines was precisely what Cho wanted? Was it not equally obvious that the footage provided no useful insight into what happened and only served to further the grief and suffering of those who had already lost loved ones? And did we really need the American Psychiatric Association to tells us that airing the footage over and over might spur copycats?

The arguments I heard in favor of airing the footage were weak. And the people from whom I sought those arguments had plenty of experience and expertise: In the course of writing a Missourian story examining how some newspapers came to the decision to run images from Cho’s video, I interviewed Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute and our own Charles Davis.

Both argued that journalists are in the business of telling people what they know, not holding information back. Davis went further and asserted that seeing the footage could help viewers process a seemingly senseless tragedy, could help confirm people’s secret hope that this really was a random madman and that there really was nothing we could have done to prevent him. Both McBride and Davis agreed that NBC showed concern for the families of victims by carefully editing Cho’s blathering before airing it.

But neither Davis nor McBride put the question of whether to air the footage to what I would deem a careful analysis. I point this out not to say that their conclusions are flawed or their reasoning specious, but rather to say that I operate on different core beliefs about journalism.

Airing the video was sure to cause harm and suffering to the victims’ families and loved ones. But journalists are often called upon to cause harm and suffering when a greater public good is at stake, so this fact alone will not answer the question of whether the footage should air.

There are two other questions to be asked here: Who are the people who might be harmed by airing the footage? Would the good done by airing the footage outweigh the harm done by doing so?

The people likely to be harmed by airing the footage were those whose loved ones were killed. They were private individuals in a moment of profound vulnerability. They sought neither power nor fame and their private grief was now at the mercy of television cameras and microphones.

The distinction between power seekers and private individuals is important for journalists. Journalists are justified in examining those who have sought power, privilege and press time, but that justification does not necessarily extend universally. It’s one thing to expose the inveterately dishonest war-mongerers in the White House and another thing to mine the suffering of families involuntarily thrust into the spotlight by a deranged killer.

And what good could airing the video do? None whatsoever. It provides no insight into why Cho did what he did other than that he was a sociopath. (Was that in much question?) It provides no meaningful way forward. The only potential gain to be had was to reassure the public that Cho was simply a madman and that there was truly nothing we could have done to predict or prevent his killing spree.

However, it was unnecessary to air the video to provide the public with that information. The NBC news team could have simply explained the content of the video and then stated, “Because of the graphic content of Cho’s video and our desire to respect the grieving families of those killed, NBC has chosen not air the video itself.”

Because all the potential good accomplished by could have been achieved without airing it, we were, on balance, left with only the harm done by airing the footage. The families of those killed, still mired grief, anger and disbelief, were treated to looped footage of Cho waving his pistols in their faces. And the rest of us are still scared out of our wits, because we now know for certain we can never prevent another crime like this. No logic can stop a madman who is himself unbound by logic.

But I suppose there is one last potential benefit to running Cho’s rant that I failed to consider: the immense amount of cash media outlets garnered by feeding the public’s lurid curiosity and frothing desire for twisted tragedy.

I find it interesting that Davis and McBride’s ethics and core beliefs happen to systematically produce results also ripe with through-the-roof ratings and profits. It would of course be fallacious to assume any sort of causation when there is only correlation. And I’m sure Davis and McBride are well aware the tensions introduced by journalism’s classically “for-profit” nature.

I’m just as guilty of wanting to eat as the next aspiring reporter. But is this what happens when your paychecks are for too long signed by the Media Hydra, of which our blessed J-School is but a minor slithering head? Does it cloud the mind so?

You Heard It Here First

2007-04-23T21:03:00.000-06:00

As an exercise in one of my introductory journalism courses in college, the professor asked each one of us students to recall how we had heard about some of the decade’s biggest breaking news stories – September 11th, the death of Princess Diana, Saddam Hussein’s capture, the space shuttle Columbia crash, the Columbine school shootings, and so on. Needless to say, all our answers varied depending on where we were, who we were with, and what we were doing.

But one trend emerged as evidence of our society’s breaking news consumption: more often than not, breaking news is broken by non-traditional news sources. Mobile communication technologies has made this more the case now than ever before via pda’s, laptops, cell phones, radio, and the like. These mediums utilize delivery mechanisms which ensure the message is both immediately accessible and always available.

Yet by doing so, these sources act more as discovery mechanisms than delivery; serving as a gateway to more traditional news media coverage. Like a tip-off or an arrow, they direct interested individuals to the news websites, cable news stations, and radio news networks that serve society with 24/7 comprehensive news content and coverage.

Such was exactly the case last Monday. Where did I first learn of the Virginia Tech tragedy? Of all places, ESPN.com. Aimlessly browsing the internet as one is prone to do on a Monday morning, my appetite for the weekend’s sports scores led me straight to the must-read story. My surprise came as much from the source as from the story.

“There’s breaking news coming out of every US news network right now about what could end up being the worst school shooting in US history…it’s even plastered all over ESPN.com,” wrote one individual on toolpower.net.

At first visit, the news was a mere “breaking news alert”; a one-sentence summary of what was known at the time. By later visits, an abc.com news story was linked and eventually the story was given center-piece treatment.

Of course it was center-piece news, it was the deadliest mass shooting in United States history. But why on ESPN.com, the world-wide leader in sports? Though the expected sports-angles were later explored, on Monday morning the Virginia Tech tragedy had as much to do with sports as it did with food, fads and fashion combined.

And yet, I would be willing to bet whoever the world-wide leaders are in food, fads, and fashion all reported the incident too. If they didn’t, they certainly should have.

Major breaking news -- the kind of rare event that you know it when you see it -- transcends niche publications; even a niche as large and powerful as sports. A website with hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each day like ESPN has an obligation to its readers to at least acknowledge its occurrence, if not further its coverage. To do anything less would be a disservice to the worldly awareness all news tries to promote.

ESPN.com has a history of such service to serious stories. Blogcritics, an online magazine, noted ESPN.com’s role in September 11th coverage. “That's odd, I thought. ESPN doesn't normally run non-sports news on their front page.”

Major breaking news is just that, odd and not normal. Further, it is the exception to niches because major breaking news is universal -- universally interesting and universally important. To ignore it and assume readers, viewers, or listeners have gotten or will get it elsewhere is to fail to understand one of the most basic roles of journalism: agenda-setting.
Major breaking news – local, national, or international – is a priori, regardless of one’s target audience. Put simply, it trumps the context of all other content.

Besides, you never know when it might fulfill that inherent journalistic instinct we all seem to strive for: the ability to say ‘You heard it here first.’ For someone, somewhere, they probably did.

I want more than daily death tolls

2007-04-23T20:32:00.000-06:00

I feel like I watch the news more often than most people my age. As a journalist, I basically feel responsible to do so. But when it comes to the war in Iraq, I feel as if I'm lost and know little to nothing about the truth of what is happening over there. And that bothers me.

The whole situation in Iraq has irritated me since the day America sent troops over there. But more than three years later, I feel even more annoyed. That's not necessarily because of what's happening, although that is factored in. But instead, it stems from frustration I feel because of the media's focus in Iraq. It's the bombings of the day and what event and place provided the highest number of deaths.

I want to know more. I need more than a daily story. I don't want to see polls about what my peers think about who is winning the war. I want a journalist who spends his or her time there to tell that to me him or herself, to tell me what they see on a daily basis. I realize some TV stations may not be able to answer my questions correctly about who is actually winning the war. And therefore, I’m forced to formulate my own opinions about what is really taking place. But that opinion shouldn't come with such little evidence. I should able to base it on more than the event of the day in Iraq. I should be able to look at the whole picture and from that, hopefully I can even reasonably see the future of the war. But, unfortunately, I feel like I don't have the opportunity to do either.

It's a journalist's job to investigate and answer these questions for me. It's the journalists' job to inform the public of the war in Iraq without just focusing on the bombings and the deaths. The reality is that American soldiers are dying and risking their lives to protect my freedom. As citizens of a country involved in the war, deserve to know what's going on. And the person that should be informing me is the journalist.

I want to hear a soldier's point a view. I'm tired of hearing what our president has to say about the war. I'm tired of relying on those statements and having no evidence to believe or disprove them. I want to see what it's like for a soldier to risk his life for this country. I don't want to hear about the daily death toll. I want the news coverage to include stories of the living soldiers. Their voices deserve to be heard. And as a citizen of this country, I deserve to hear it. If you're going to truly cover the war as a TV station, then cover it. Don't give me the death toll and a story on the latest bombing without giving these other stories.

I see my friends get into arguments constantly about who is winning the war. And it saddens me that I feel like neither are right. Neither has evidence to really back up what he is saying. Instead, we rely on political agendas and the statements from politicians living in the United States. At times I wonder if they know much more than I do.

I don't know what it would be like to cover the war in Iraq. It's a job I don't think I would have the guts to do. And I admire those who chose that path. But if you're going to chose that path, then don't go for the shock story of the day. For the first few weeks or months into the war, that might have been what us viewers were looking for. But four years later, I want more.

Give me an overall outlook. I can hardly stand to watch the daily shock story anymore. As a journalist covering the war, remember your first obligation is to all of us viewers back home, the viewers left questioning and wondering about the real situation of a war in which we have friends or family fighting in.

As for my final request, please stop arguing about the justifications for the entry into the war. It’s been four years. Whether it was justified or not, we are in this war. Let’s focus on the now. Let’s focus on what the outlook is for the war now and not whether we should or shouldn’t be there at all.

Using more than the usual suspects

2007-04-23T20:28:00.000-06:00

Primary sources are essential to journalism. But those primary sources also need to be verified with facts and other supporting information. Reporters writing on Iraq before and during the war have not always done that extra legwork.

Judith Miller, formerly of The New York Times, is a perfect example. Her stories leading up to the invasion of Iraq said there was enough evidence to remove all doubt that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. She relied on a usual set of sources, whom she trusted and had used in the past. They were the big-time officials of the Bush administration. She had no reason not to use their intelligence at the time, and even less reason not to accept what she learned when she was embedded with the exploitation team Alpha in Iraq.

But what should a journalist accept as fact and what should they question of their sources when several of those higher-ranking officials are telling you the same thing?

A problem that Miller should have been curious about is if the administration was hiding an agenda. In fact they planted these “facts” regarding WMD’s into her reporting and then often referred back to her stories as fact in other interviews with various media, as PBS’ Frontline examined recently in its “News War” program.

Jack Schafer, of Slate Magazine, did a lot of in-depth writing on Miller’s reporting and in an interview on New York Public Radio in 2005 he said, “viewed in today's context, Judith Miller's reporting on weapons of mass destruction from Iraq seemed very much like cheerleading…you can see that her reporting is consistently exaggerated and overplayed the evidence for weapons of mass destruction.”

But Miller is not the only journalist guilty of reporting what might be false information, though she was used as the scapegoat so the media could have someone to blame. And I think it is inappropriate to blame her for reporting falsities. I respect her for standing behind her reporting and explaining where she got her information and why it was not unusual to believe it.

When faced with situations that you cannot be directly involved with and you must rely on others to provide you with information – it can be tough for a journalist to know whom to trust.

I can’t imagine being a reporter in the war zone and trying to make sure I have my facts straight and enough proof from several people to back it up, all the while legitimately worrying about safety. I’m sure it’s easy and less threatening to just repeat what information the military officials are handing out, but as the war wears on people are getting more and more fatigued of the numbers dead story and the car bomb today story. These are still important things that everyone should be informed on, but now is the time to analyze why we are still where we are and what progress, if any has been made.

I see stories come over on the progress the U.S. has made with the security crackdown in Baghdad, with all the major sources as military and political officials. I will see a mention of how there might seem to be peace in Baghdad, yet out of the city there is still an insurgency threatening lives. What should be done with those stories is to go more in-depth about why there is this false sense of victory in Iraq’s capital and the reporters should take a more critical eye at what news is being fed to them instead of just spitting it back out at the readers.

A lot easier said than done, I suppose. And I do respect those who are over there trying to connect the story with those of us back at home.

Time for a self-critique

2007-04-23T20:20:00.000-06:00

Once again, journalists – and journalism – seem to making the news instead of simply reporting it. Now a week removed from a horrific shooting at the Virginia Tech campus, citizens are complaining about the media coverage of the shooting and media outlets themselves are questioning how they handled one of the biggest news stories in recent years. I think one of the problems lies in the words in that last sentence: ‘the biggest news story.’ I will admit that I was initially glued to coverage of the shooting as were most Americans last Monday. However, as the week passed, I felt as if media outlets treated the unfolding events as simply ‘the biggest news story,’ without stepping back (literally) and showing true compassion and concern for those involved.

When I turned on one of the news networks on Monday night, the first news story I saw was a female journalists talking to students inside the Virginia Tech dorm where Cho killed his first two victims. The group of students this reporter found seemed willing to be interviewed. However, what we did not see were the students who the reporter asked and who refused. One of the students, according to NPR, was outraged at the request to be interviewed inside her dorm room. NPR reported that this female student was approached by another female reporter who asked for an interview. The student asked to be left alone and the reporter answered by handing the student her business card and saying, “Call me.” Again, journalists tried to take advantage of the vulnerable because they had a one-track goal: ‘the biggest story.’

This journalist was not alone in her invasion of the VT campus. When video cameras scrolled a parking lot adjacent to one of the school’s classroom buildings, you couldn’t see the end of a line of television news trucks. A campus, a community that was trying to heal had to do it while being inundated with a seemingly infinite amount of journalists. While it is our role to educate the public and to report on events like these in a thorough fashion, was it really necessary for news outlets to send so many people to Blacksburg? Was it in the best interest of the students who were trying to heal and to come to grips with the day’s events to have to be bombarded by notebooks, recorders, questions and video cameras? Why did morning news shows have to send their anchors to report live on campus? Was that really necessary? While journalism outlets were pushing to be the ones to break new details and to find the most inspirational stories from students, I believe they may have impeded some people’s healing process by not showing enough sensitivity.

After a few days of non-stop coverage on the Virginia Tech shootings, you could still turn on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other 24/7 news channels and still see nearly 24-hour continuous coverage of the events. After a while, such inundation of coverage simply disillusions the public. With few new details emerging late in the week, was it really necessary to report the same stories over and over again each hour? Is there a point in which journalists overstep the necessary principles of information gatherers and reporters? I am fearful of what these 24/7 news channels have the power to do to the public. With the media already seen negatively by so many in society, the over saturation of events such as the Virginia Tech shootings may only further push away those who see the media as having its own underlying agenda and motives already.

Another aspect of the media’s coverage that is being questioned relates to NBC’s release of the video tapes and transcripts that they received from Cho in the mail. Going back to journalism’s role as an information provider, I think it was the right decision for the news station to release the video. However, I think that they played the clips of Cho way too frequently. For the public, seeing the images of Cho helped us to begin to understand the psychology of this killer; furthermore, it also helped assuage fears that people had about there being a larger plot beneath these killings. Jack Shafer of Slate also agreed saying: “NBC News needn’t apologize to anybody for originally airing the Cho videos and pictures. The Virginia Tech slaughter is an ugly story, but the five W’s of journalism – who, what, where, when, and why – demand that journalists ask the question ‘why?’ even if they can’t adequately answer it. If you’re interested in knowing why Cho did what he did, you want to see the videos and photos and read from the transcripts. If you’re not interested, you should feel free to avert your eyes.”

But once the tape was released, seeing it plastered as the background on news images and hearing the recordings played incessantly on the news became too much. We knew the information so why did we have to be reminded of it every time we turned on the TV? The images of Cho as well as the emphasis on his South Korean nationality may also have caused an unnecessary amount of scrutiny, blame and ridicule on the South Korean community. I have a friend on campus here who is a foreign exchange student from South Korea who was verbally assaulted last week on the MU campus. She was called names and cornered by a group of students because she shares the same nationality as the Virginia Tech shooter. I can’t help but wonder that if the media had not so emphatically emphasized the fact that Cho was South Korean that maybe the backlash against that community would not have been so strong.

In the midst of a crisis like we saw last week, it can be justifiably hard for media outlets to step back and dissect their coverage of the events. Details are coming out in a hurry, and there is that innate desire – and maybe even necessity because of the nature of the business – to want to provide more exhaustive coverage than your competitor. But even if we can’t self-critique during the events, we have the opportunity as journalists to do so now in order to better prepare for crises to follow. The events showed great strides in journalism as well, with one of the biggest being the level of citizen journalism that arose from that awful day. The citizen journalism that we saw last week marks a change in how journalism will cover crises in the future and how it will be reported. As for the professionals in the business, there is work to be done. Maybe showing compassion should be more important than an exclusive. Maybe we should be take a step back instead of finding a way to get past that police tape. Maybe labeling something “the biggest news story” shouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind.

Making sense of the senseless

2007-04-23T19:44:00.000-06:00

In times of crisis, news organizations take center stage as the primary sources of communication about such events. When events such as hurricanes or terrorist attacks garner national and international attention, people turn to news sources to provide them with the information they need. The April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech are no exception. Throughout that day and the days that followed, news organizations provided up-to-the-minute news and information on the shootings, the victims, the shooter and the responses. Many people, especially those with ties to Virginia Tech, stayed glued to their television or computer for the latest developments. In situations like this, the news becomes the primary means through which citizens begin to understand and give meaning to the events that have taken place. And when a major tragedy occurs, the skills and judgment of news organizations and those who work within them are put to the test.

After the Columbine shootings in 1997, Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute wrote, “In times of crisis, we demand the best from the people on the front lines of the story. The cops. The paramedics, doctors, and nurses. The teachers. We should expect no less from the people telling those stories.”(1) Indeed, the journalists covering the Virginia Tech shootings — whether writing for the Web, producing for a national cable news organization or reporting for a local community newspaper — were expected to cover the events accurately, truthfully and tastefully. “Whatever our role, whatever our platform,” writes Steele, “we are journalists trying to put together pieces of an incomprehensible jigsaw puzzle and tell a story that has meaning.”(1)

The ways in which journalists attempt to “make sense of the senseless”(1) can vary greatly among different organizations and among different news media. For example, NBC News chose to broadcast portions of the package it received from Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui. In a statement, NBC says it chose to air the material only “after careful consideration and with great sensitivity,” and the organization felt the material “provides some answers to the critical question, ‘WHY did this man carry out these awful murders?’”(2) NBC’s decision reflects the fact that these videos and photos, though violent and potentially offensive or painful, were the first glimpse into Cho’s state of mind when these acts were committed. Within this context, NBC decided that its role was to deliver this information despite its more controversial aspects.

The decision by NBC affiliate WSLS TV in Roanoke, Va. to ban further use of much of the material illustrates how this news organization perceived its role as different from that of NBC News. WSLS initially aired the images as “a new development in the investigation” and as “the first insight into his state of mind.”(2) But after this initial airing, WSLS chose not to continue airing the most violent of these images and words, explaining that the organization felt it was no longer newsworthy and “would only cause further pain to the Virginia Tech community.”(2) The decision reflects the affiliate’s role as a local news station that must keep in mind the ramifications of its coverage on the community it serves.

Citizens’ needs during times of crisis mean that journalists must consider the relevancy of information within the context of the individual communities they serve. Journalists must put aside their emotions and sift through conflicting reports to provide citizens with the most accurate, truthful information possible. When a major tragedy such as the Virginia Tech shootings occurs, it is the role of journalists and news organizations to help citizens understand and make meaning of the events taking place in their world.

(1) Steele, Bob. “Worst of times demand the best from journalists.” Poynter Online. 16 April 2007. http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=121526.
(2) Angelotti, Ellyn. “Decision Examined: Poynter discussion of NBC’s use of the killer’s video.” Poynter Online. 20 April 2007. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=121760.

Context is everything

2007-04-23T19:22:00.000-06:00

Disclaimer: I am hesitant to talk about journalism’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan because doing so would inevitably involve my political perspective. I cannot remain politically objective if I am discussing why and what journalists should be skeptical of concerning our current military operations.

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
Journalists are supposed to be gatekeepers. We are part of the system of checks and balances that is integral to democracy. It is our duty to be the most skeptical, to ask the most questions, to be pessimistic, to be untrusting.
Journalists don’t ask enough ‘why’ questions of officials. It is important for news audiences to understand the ‘why’ behind the ‘what.’ Telling readers every day that people died in one location and killed each other in another does not help them understand why it’s happening or what and whom it’s affecting.
We should challenge use of jargon and the political non-answers that are perpetually spewed out of politicians’ and military officials’ mouths.
All questions about her loyalty aside, Judith Miller didn’t provide enough substance for her claims while reporting about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Her nebulous sources should have been clearly identified and her evidence supported. But it wasn’t. And her editors should have looked past the Pulitzer badge that goes with her name, and questioned her.

FEEDING FLAMES
The public accuses the press of feeding the flames of war and opposition. We can’t win because we’re the ones (hopefully) providing all sides of the news. So when officials make an announcement about weapons of mass destruction, we’re going to report it. And we should follow up on it with our own research.
After the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration played the role of Chicken Little.
The sky was falling.
Other countries were harboring terrorists: We went to Afghanistan. Weapons of mass destruction were threatening our security: We went to Iraq.
Did anyone question these assertions? Not enough. I’m not going to make a statement here about whether I think the Bush administration’s claims were right or wrong. But I can say that journalists didn’t question things enough.
So why didn’t we challenge officials? Why didn’t we ask for harder evidence? I think part of that answer lies in the wall government often puts up between policy making and the press. Politicians tell the press they can only know what they can afford to know. But how do we know that’s even true? Can we ever truly know whose interests they're serving?

WHAT WE CAN DO
As the proverbial “they” say, hindsight is 20/20. Should we have asked more questions about political motives and economic interests concerning Iraq? Definitely. But we’ve been in Iraq and Afghanistan for several years now. And we probably won’t ever completely pull out. We still have military personnel in Korea and Vietnam, after all.
We should learn from our experience with this administration – and previous others – and ask the tough questions. The media should never have to feel inhibited or intimidated by officials. It’s politicians’ and journalists’ job to serve the public. And we shouldn’t let people stand in the way of that.

One of the best things we can do for readers today is provide context for them. Audiences have lost sight of how we got to Iraq and Afghanistan.
It amazes me that, in the face of civil war in Iraq, people don’t know the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni.
How much money have we spent? How much will we spend over the course of the next 20 years? How much progress has been made? How many troops have been killed and injured? What are the claims people make in favor of being in Iraq and Afghanistan? What are the claims people make against being there?
It is our duty to answer every question that could be asked about these issues. The best way I can think of doing this is through the use of infoboxes. Just two inches of copy with background information or type about how the issues affect readers could make a world of difference.

We aren’t doing good enough a job of breaking the issues down for readers. They’ve been reading every day about car bombings and the number of people killed. And the numbers are losing meaning.
People need to be reminded of the reasons given for why we got involved in the Middle East. People need to know what life is like for Iraqis and Afghanis.
People need to be told how these issues affect them.
When events occur thousands – even just hundreds – of miles away, Americans tend to take an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude. If it doesn’t affect them as part of a capitalistic society, they don’t care. They don’t seek answers. They’d rather not know the gory details.
But our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is having an affect on us and our future. We should be preparing people today by educating them, giving them the information they can use to make decisions about their lives – and their votes – that can help determine what happens later.

Doing the most good possible...

2007-04-23T18:43:00.000-06:00

“Monday, April 16, 2007, will forever be remembered as the deadliest shooting in American history.”

I heard these words, or some variation thereof, many times last week…the broadcaster would dramatically say them on the TV and radio. News websites would offset them in bold writing. And every time I heard or saw these words I shuddered.

Let’s take a step back. There are moments in history where I feel like I’m proud to say I’m a journalist. I’m proud of the work that we do, the noble sacrifice that we make. Journalists were the ones to bring America to the Virginia Tech campus—to help the nation be bound together in the midst of tragedy.

But journalists can also misuse this great power to do harm. As I alluded to in the beginning of the essay, the first major problem journalists seem to have in response to the VA Tech shootings was sensationalizing the story. It gave a sense of awe to the “deadliest shooting in American history.” I couldn’t help but wonder how many psychos out there were listening to the broadcasts or reading the articles thinking, “I could beat that, then they would be talking that way about me.”

Secondly, there was the automatic insertion into the coverage about how this affects the great debate over gun control. Were policy makers discussing gun control? Was the average man-on-the-street discussing gun control? No. There were some foreign media institutions discussing gun control, but that was a little different. Journalists do have an important role in agenda setting, but in this case I think the automatic jump on the gun-control bandwagon only served to hurt journalists’ credibility. It reinforced the stereotype of liberal journalists who will use any situations to promote their agenda.

I am not saying that gun control should never be an issue in relation to the shootings, but the timing and the fact that the issue was solely media-driven, made it appear like journalists were taken advantage of the situation for their own platform.

My final media criticism relating to the crisis (although I’m sure I could think of more than just these three) was the extreme emphasis on the South Korean ethnicity of the shooter. It seems to be one of the most common things we here in journalism training, to quote Fred Fedler about crime stories, —“Never report a suspect’s race or religion unless it is clearly relevant to the story.”

Once again, I do understand that the fact that Seung-Hui Cho was not an American citizen did play some role in his biographical sketch, but the media paid so much attention to it. Headlines read “South Korean identified as shooter.” After reading some of the headlines and emphasis on Cho’s ethnicity, a person might think South Korea was out to get America.

Although there is no excuse for the senseless acts of violence that have taken place against the Asian community in the past week, I think the media helped to perpetuate them by putting so much emphasis on Cho being a South Korean. Instead of Cho being seen as a confused, troubled young man, he was presented as a confused, troubled South Korean…and those two words make a big difference.

I do have one last complaint. This does not directly relate to the media, but other responses. On Friday, the bells at MU rang 32 times. Thirty-three people died at Virginia Tech. Yes, Cho did inflict his own wound, yes he took the lives of many others. But Cho, like the other victims, still has a family that is dealing with loss. His family is probably also dealing with guilt, shame, anger and insults directed at them. Yet, MU and some other memorials did not want to recognize Cho’s humanity. Maybe it was because he was a “South Korean.” Maybe because it just seemed like the easy way out. I would be interested in knowing their rationale.

The original assignment had been to write about Iraq. Although this is much different in some ways, it’s the same. Every day journalists are faced with questions about Iraq—how much of their own agenda should be on the story (it often seems like it is there a lot, on both sides of the story)? How much should we show the humanity of the enemies (even if in doing so it could hurt our own troops)? These are tough questions. Questions that I don’t honestly can’t answer. But my best advice to journalists is don’t miss the question. I think that’s too often the problem with stories. It was the problem with Virginia Tech, it’s often the problem with Iraq. Journalists didn’t spend enough time examining their own biases and taking a step back and in the end the good they did may have equaled the bad.

Placing the Blame for Iraq (again)

2007-04-23T17:57:00.000-06:00

Americans, especially journalists, tend to look back on the origins of the Iraq war too much in my opinion. I'm not talking about the assessment of blame for the ensueing debacle -- there no doubt needs to be a whole lot more accountability for faulty pre-war intelligence, suspicious allocation of "defense" contracts and the astonishing lack of an exit strategy that will leave America mired there for years to come, if not in terms of troop presence then in terms of the region's impact on our ability to deal with increased terrorism abroad. But that does us no good in fixing the problems that plague the region now, which should be a top priority, especially for those politicians who voted for the war and are now defending their vote as unavoidable at the time. The truth is, politically, it was the right thing to do at the time
In the beginning the Bush administration and Congress displayed what most of us now recognize as gullible optimism, something that, we should have realized by now, is never an asset in war. The worst sin, though, was the media's inability to recognize it at the time. At the time I halfheartedly supported the war because there didn't seem to be much reason to oppose it. Saddam was an awful dictator to be sure, but I have trouble believing that living under him was a worse experience than living in anarchy, at least for most Iraqis. Torture, rape and murder were not uncommon under Saddam, but they are seemingly less uncommon now, and the future certainly doesn't look any better, especially after American troops leave and Iraq loses its best stabilizing factor.
But looking to the origins of the war doesn't seem to do us any good at this point. America's prerogative today is finding a way to withdraw from Iraq without leaving an ineffective government in place. The media, to its credit, has atoned for its earlier lack of good reporting and has done its part in exploring the options. The best solution I've seen to date was explored "The New Republic" writer Peter Galbraith, who writes that we should partition Iraq into three segments, one for Sunnis, one for Shiites and one for Kurds, in his article "Iraq: What's next? Divide the country." The Kurds, he writes, have already voted by a 98% majority for independence, and the Sunnis and Shiites have largely approved of that.
The Shiites and Sunnis create a more complicated situation. If American troops leave sometime in the next two years, a period of increased instability will most likely follow. The danger is that Iran may choose to take advantage of that instability, a prospect that would no doubt push us back into war, especially with Bush, who is already exploring military options to deal with Iran (we know that thanks to the Seymour Hirsh, one of the few journalists who seemed to realize what the consequences of the war would be before it began), in the White House. Three separate Iraqs would no doubt be weaker than the one Iraq was under Saddam, but may be more powerful than the chaotic semi-anarchy that seems to exist today, or at least that would exist to a greater extent without the presence of American troops.
Another imperative should be allowing Iraqi citizens without ties to the insurgency into America with little or no wait period. It's a little bit of a pipe dream to think that this could work, but it's the only moral solution I could come up with. Iraq was no picnic before the invasion, but it seems to have only gotten worse in the ensueing years. Granting refugee status to the Iraqis who would choose to come to the United States -- and a great number of them have illustrated their willingness and desire to leave the country, just look at all those flowing into neighboring countries -- would be a good way to right some of the wrongs of the war.
But there is of course no easy or clear cut solution. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. I hesitantly supported the troop surge in the sense that it offers a little bit of hope that we can turn Iraq around, but it's easy for me to say that, I'm in no danger of being killed by a suicide bomber from 10,000 miles away.

Beat a story to death coverage

2007-04-23T17:01:00.000-06:00

I have always been aware of media criticism. I’ve been presented the research in countless journalism and political science courses. These faceless figures show declining trust and viewer ship. But, until recently I haven’t heard the media criticized to this extent, and most importantly, the criticism is coming from my living room, from my peers.

Recent “hot” news topics have been the Don Imus controversy, Anna Nicole-Smith’s death, and the Virginia Tech massacre. And throughout it all, the war in Iraq is always on the front/side burner. The only similarity in these three topics is that the media can’t get enough. And it’s turning people off.

I recently flipped through the cable news channels and my roommates were begging me to turn it. They are sick of the 24-hour, beat-a-story-to-death approach to news coverage. The next day I heard the same thing at a friend’s house. People are getting tired of being bombarded by a news story. Often it feels like it's impossible to hide from the latest breaking news coverage of frivolous custody battles between worthless celebrities.

Eventually the media will move on, and popular perception is that they will just pick a new issue to over emphasize. I believe the lesson here is to learn, how much is too much. The Virginia Tech massacre warrants more coverage than Don Imus’ comments, and Don Imus deserved more coverage than Anna Nicole-Smith, but in every case there is a line that should not be crossed.

The war in Iraq is different. It has lasted over three years now and while the approval of the war is declining, I don’t believe we know enough about what is really going on there. I don’t want shock jock coverage of the war in Iraq. I don’t want bloody headlines. The saddest aspect of the war in Iraq is that there are good things going on there. We just don’t hear about it. I realize there are nearly daily bombings and instability. It should be covered, but where is the diversity in coverage?

Iraq is a different story.

I see the same white faces covering the war. I want to see how Al-Jazeera covers the war. I want to see all aspects of Iraq and we simply don’t get it here. It is easy to fall into the rut of what we think is best, or worse, what we think the people want to see. The only headlines I see are the number dead and latest bombing. I don’t know what is going on with the schools, sports, entertainment, or business in Iraq. Do these things exist in Iraq? Numbers just become statistics and the distance between the U.S. and Iraq seems to increase. People need to care. And the current pace of coverage is making people distance themselves from the media.

The reality is that the media can never get it 100% right. And competition between the media only complicates coverage. It’s about money and ratings, not quality coverage. It’s expensive and dangerous to send correspondents around the world. Iraq is dangerous and it’s hard to find the progress when civilians and soldiers are dying. But the public deserves better. We should see how Iraqis, Europeans, Russians, South Africans, etc. feel about the war too. We live in a global society.

I'm beginning to think that we have too many news channels, and not enough news.

Setting the agenda

2007-04-23T15:31:00.000-06:00

What is our role as journalists in the war in Iraq? Well lets start with what our role is as journalists in general. To me, a journalist is supposed to educate. Specifically, they should help people understand how the news affects their daily lives.

The problem with the war in Iraq (well, one of the problems) is that people don’t care. There is no sense of urgency, even though we’ve been at war for over four years. Think about it, our nation has been at war for our entire college careers.

Studies have shown that people want news that affects them directly; it’s why so little attention is given to international news. Unlike Vietnam, there is no draft so many American lives are not interrupted by the war in Iraq. Therefore, they don’t want to hear about it all the time.

Journalism should take the war and show people how is affects them. How does this war change American lives?

As for giving people local news and giving little attention to international issues, I am strongly against it. Is journalism about what people want to know or what people need know? They say journalists set the agenda and decide what is news. Is Aleck Baldwin yelling at his daughter really more important than the war this country is involved in? That’s what I got from the two hours of CNN I watched Saturday morning. Stars before soldiers…

When news networks and papers do cover the war it’s always the same: a lot of numbers (mostly death tolls) or commentary about how it’s hurting Bush and the Republicans. No matter what side of the bench your on, I think we can all agree that we’re tired of hearing Dems and Reps go at it. And so are the American people, so why to journalists continue to cover it?

Instead of just telling us how many people died in a car bombing, tell us what it means. How many bombings have there been since the start of the war and what is being done to stop them? Is the situation in Iraq getting better at all? What are the positive and negatives about withdrawing the troops. I understand that these are difficult questions to answer in a war that is festering with scandal, secrecy and contempt, but why, then, do we even have reporters there risking their lives to get mediocre stories? Where is the analysis, the in depth reporting of what its really like or what this war really means for our country.

I admit there is some great reporting that comes out of war coverage; however, when that happens it’s often buried in the “international/national” section of the paper or in the middle of the broadcast. Our nation is at war. War makes the section front. I know we like local content, but on a slower local day why not put a story about the war on the front instead of an AP fluff piece? A reader shouldn’t have to dig to get information on the war.

Watching war coverage is sad and depressing. I don’t like hearing about how many young men and women died or how many people died in today’s bombing. And, after a while, I ignore it or become immune. That’s why it is so important for journalists to keep people interested and learning more about the war. It is our job to motivate people to form an opinion on the war, not to make the immune to it.

The tension

2007-04-23T13:56:00.000-06:00

The Missourian ran an article Friday about how readers responded to some newspapers’ decision to run the photos of Seung-Hui Cho on their front page. In the article, which written by our own Stephen Nellis, Brad Stertz, news editor at the Daily Press in Hampton Roads, Va., described the papers reason for running a page-width photo of Cho, pistols drawn and three smaller photos on Thursday’s A1.

“It came out right one our deadline. There hadn’t been a real complete picture that had come forward on the killer. The thought was, ‘This information and these images would provide a lot more context to what happened.’ With that as a basis, we decided to show it, as shocking as some of the information was and the pictures were.”

I was wire editing Wednesday night, and Stertz was definitely right about the story breaking on the morning news cycle. A different breaking story – the shooting of 17-year-old Tedarrian Robinson – pushed the 3 o’clock budget meeting back to 4:30 p.m.; the news that NBC received a package from Cho bursted at about 4:20 p.m. By the time budget adjourned at 5, AP had a 20-inch story. At 6:30, NBC aired some of the package’s footage and photos. By 7, AP’s story was 55 inches.

During my shift, tracking down the photos Cho sent to NBC did not even cross my mind. Perhaps that doesn’t say much about me as a wire editor. Or perhaps it just means that we had a bigger local story that deserved the space. But if I had thought of it, and if there hadn’t been a shooting victim discovered at Reactor Field at MU, would have we run the photos?

It’s a hard question to answer, even in hindsight. The issue at hand, as Poynter Institute media ethicist Kelly McBride described in the Missourian’s article, is “an inherent tension between our journalistic obligation to something that the audience is very interested in and then our obligation to minimize the harm we might cause.” In other words, we would have had to assess the value the photos of Cho added to the story while considering the harmful impact the images could cause.

While I agree that the photos did add another layer to the story, I’m not sure I buy the Daily Press’ justification that they “would provide a lot more context to what happened.” Personally, I’m not the images aided in understanding the context of the killings since they were posed, planned pictures – all we saw was the person Cho wanted the world to see. Actually, the photos could have added to the confusion surrounding the events, as they scream the questions of why and how did this troubled man slip through the cracks?

With this in mind, had the conversation come up in the newsroom that day, I would have been in favor of using the photos – to an extent. The fact that Cho sent this package and its contents to NBC was big, relevant news. The story certainly needed to be out front, and perhaps the pictures, too. What did not need to happen is blow the photos up to dominate the page. Given the shock that struck the nation, the image of Cho pointing two guns at the camera would have had a powerful effect regardless of size. Making such a picture so large, especially when a smaller one would have sufficed, greatly increased the potential for harm. In the Daily Press' case, it actually did.At the Missourian, printing those photos on a day when the city had its own shooting scare certainly would have been harmful to its readers.

All in all, I think the Missourian handled the situation well (even if the on duty wire editor didn't raise the question).

What are you first?

2007-04-23T13:30:00.000-06:00

“When the nation goes to war, the press goes with it, the blather on CNN or Fox or MSNBC is part of a long and sad tradition,” Christ Hedges, reporter for The New York Times once said. The role of journalists, whether they are freelancing, embedded or sent with an entire news crew, during war has long been a debated issue. To provide accurate and objective news should still remain a priority for reporters, but the atmosphere and restrictions of war make this goal much harder to achieve.

The media coverage of the war in Iraq has led to many questions about the proper role of a journalist’s during role time of war. Shortly after the attacks on Sept 11 the federal government passed the Patriot Act, making searches on newsrooms and document confiscation from reporters legal. War allows for the government to pass more restrictive laws and engage in news censorship under the reasoning of “homeland security.” Critics of the media’s coverage of the war claim reporters are providing patriotic sentiments and acting as “cheerleaders” for the government.

When discussing the journalists’ role in war it is important to remember how we got here. How news is disseminated during war has improved over the years. During the Spanish English War and World War I journalists relied on military and government officials for news. Only portions of the news was provided by government officials, and they often left out death rates and minimized damages in an effort to gain media backing and support the war effort.

During WWII the government selectively allowed journalists to be embedded with soldiers but all reports had to go through the newly created Office of Censorship. The office reviewed all communications coming into and leaving the United States. One of the most popular and influential journalists during the Second World War was Ernie Pyle. A journalist from Indiana, Pyle convinced the government to embed him with soldiers in London. Pyle wrote a weekly column focusing not just on the war, but on the lives of the GIs. Pyle wrote about the hardships the soldiers faced like the lack of variety in the food and how they entertained themselves. He wrote about what he saw, felt and touched in a feature-like style that captivated the reader. Through his detailed writing his audience was able to understand what war is really like for soldiers. And it often didn’t match the “heroic image” the government was trying to paint. For 50 years correspondents wrote about war as heroic, and a glorious pursuit to unite the country, but the war in Vietnam changed all that. Because war was never officially declared against the country, the government could not restrict journalists and the reports they produced. Citizens were shocked and angered when they read the stories being produce by correspondents in Vietnam.

War correspondents in the Middle have more freedom and ability to move around during a war, but they’re still limited in what can and cannot be reported. War correspondents face hardships in their ability to report that other reporters don’t have to deal with. War reporters can’t generalize, it is impossible to know what is going on a mile away and it is always difficult to know what really happened.

War correspondences have the responsibility of accurately portraying what is going on over seas to our soldiers. Reporters should provide critical analysis reports of the action, and provide readers with balanced news. I think many Americans still do not know exactly what is going on in Iraq and other Middle East countries, and part of that is because of the lack of reporting. The American public needs access to independent sources of information, and reporters need to become more objective and analytical in their reporting.

There is a fine line between providing an accurate picture of what is going on overseas and giving away strategic military secrets. I have had many discussions about the coverage of the Iraq war and one of the most intriguing questions I have been asked is: What are you first: an American or a journalist?

The Journalist's Role In Iraq

2007-04-23T11:26:00.000-06:00

Feelings on the media in Iraq are mixed. Most of those within the field, myself included, feel like it is the media’s duty to be there. Many members of the military feel like the media, especially those embedded with their troops, are a burden. People outside the media, many U.S. viewers, have mixed reactions – feeling that the media should be there but should stay far out of the way.

The opinion of many media members is expressed well in this quote from Sig Christenson, military reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. "All we ask for is fair play," says Christenson, currently on assignment in Iraq. "It's a pretty tough place to work, and what we reporters are doing is in the great tradition of American democracy: to tell people back home what is taking place, the good and the bad. At the end of the day, Americans should be thankful."

The media is there to inform the American people about things that they cannot see with their own eyes. It’s the same purpose that the media has at home. However, when the government puts restrictions on the media it makes it difficult for them to do their jobs. The government should not be able to tell members of the media where they can and cannot go, what they can and cannot take pictures of and what they can and cannot report on. These are violations of the First Amendment and hinder the media’s main job – to inform the people.

The stories about soldiers treating members of the media badly are horrible. The soldiers should be appreciative of the media – just as the media is appreciative of the soldiers. The media is there to tell the story of the soldier and relay it to the people back home. The media is not there to paint the soldiers in a negative light, and in my opinion has not been doing so.

Average citizens have varying opinions on the role of the media in Iraq.

“It’s nice that they’re there, but they’re not soldiers,” says Kathleen Blakeney. “They’re not necessarily qualified to be over there – it’s not necessarily the safest thing. When they get abducted or become involved in combat they don’t know what to do. It’s just not safe.”

Kathleen suggested that maybe retired soldiers or other people with military or security background should be war journalists. While this is a great idea, and probably has been implemented somewhere, I don’t know that it’s necessarily feasible. If a soldier is retired, chances are he does not want to go back into a combat situation, even if it’s not as a soldier.

In my opinion, the media has a right to be in Iraq. They have a right to report on anything and everything that they see in an unbiased, but informed manner. If they are inhibited from doing that somehow, then it is not fair. The American people depend on the media for information. If they can only get their information from the government, then they will not be getting the whole, unbiased story.

Rozen, Laura. Journalists take flak in Iraq. The Nation. 12 January, 2004. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040112/rozen

Citizen Journalism kicks down the door

2007-04-22T21:15:00.000-06:00

After a semester of talking about possibilities and probabilities, we finally got our answer with the shootings at Virginia Tech: citizen journalism is going to play a huge role in media’s future. It was easy to debate things before there was a really large news event to put our theories to the test, but I’d say now the evidence is undeniable.

As soon as I learned about the shootings taking place, I flipped on the TV and started browsing the Internet to see what I could find out. The style of reporting wasn’t a complete shock to me, but the scale on which they were using it

On TV, reporters had not quite reached the scene, but news anchors on all of the national 24-hour news networks were reporting on calls parents and students at the university made to them. They read stories from blogs and showed photos that were posted almost instantaneously. Their entire reports relied on reporting citizens were providing them with.

The Internet was even more detailed. The information was posted in story form, but the stories the Web sites posted linked to cell phone videos, pictures students with digital cameras took and stories students in the barricaded classrooms were posting to blogs. The complete reliance on citizens for the news drove home the point that we’re no longer working in a traditional media setting.

As much as some of us may dislike the idea that citizens can and will report on many large news stories, it’s no longer a choice we have nor something we can control. The ease with which you can post news to Blogger, photos to a site like Flickr and video to YouTube removed the barriers to citizens wanting to instantly share news. What our discussion should focus on now is not the “if the media is going to evolve” debate but how we are going to adapt with it.

By using these citizen reports, photos and video as a strong supplement to what we do, we can once again strengthen our position as a provider of information and more importantly, build more credibility with the people we are continuously covering. Denying the usefulness citizens have in reporting news is ignorance at best and ridiculous arrogance at worst. Providing a place for all of these forms of communication and information to culminate, newspapers (both print and more specifically online) can once again establish themselves as the top news source in media.

Large-scale news events like this, though horribly unfortunate and sad, will occur many times in the future. We should use this tragic event as the basis of how coverage should work in the new media world. By studying the coverage that was provided, we can learn how we can improve on what we did and how to fix flaws in our system. By providing complete coverage of events like this, we can start to regain some of the readership we’ve lost over past years.

This also applies to smaller events and news stories. By providing thorough coverage of them and giving citizen journalists the ability to contribute to the newsgathering and reporting processes, we stand to gain tremendously from a huge influx of stories, ideas and opinions that we’ve been lacking in recent years.

The concept of citizen journalism has been lauded as the future of our profession by certain professors during my schooling over the past few years, but I think the shootings at Virginia Tech drove the point home as a reality. If we’re smart, we’ll use this as evidence that we need to seriously consider making some changes in the newsroom and adapt to the future mediascape. If not, we’ll just continue to fall farther behind.

Dry Bones

2007-04-22T20:53:00.000-06:00

Like the three front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination, I think the war in Iraq is important in our defending this country against Islamic terrorism. The 2008 election will be the first election in over 30 years where a central campaign’s issue is America’s role in a war on foreign soil. Although our focus remains on Iraq, our challenge is farther-reaching -- in Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan and Iran. A March 2007 CNN poll showed that 21 percent of Americans want to withdraw from Iraq now, 37 percent within a year; and 39 percent want to remain as long as necessary.

I would make up the 39 percent who “want to remain as long as necessary.” Which is why I wouldn’t be very good at reporting this story.

And yet, I must admit to being mildly exasperated by the current coverage of the war. I never doubted the difficulty foreign correspondents face. The war is costly and dangerous. Journalists are now the targets and, in many ways, their lot has become “a lonelier media scene,” as Sherry Ricchiardi notes in her article “How danger and high costs limit Iraq coverage.” She suggests that the “relentless violence in Iraq has seriously compromised coverage of arguably the most important story in the world today. Certain facets of the conflict remain exasperatingly elusive or, at best, thinly reported” (28).

In researching for this essay, I came across an April 19, 2007, article by Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal that suggested Americans are “hollowed out”; we’re tired and seem to be suffering from dry bones -- the world-weary feeling that seems to seep into one’s bones after enduring tragedy after tragedy. Henninger suggests that Americans’ response to the Virginia Tech shootings weren’t “inappropriate, inadequate or lacking sympathy”; rather, it “just seemed that the emotional surge was discernibly less than with similar events in the past -- such as Oklahoma City, the Beltway sniper, Columbine, the Branch Davidians. This was the sort of event that normally would have caused one's phone to ring off the hook or email inbox to fill with alerts from friends. But that didn't seem to happen this time. If one wasn't watching TV, the news arrived with an uncharacteristic delay.”

But what of the war in Iraq? To me, the media recently have become more detached, cynical, unemotional. While a moving story can just as easily bore, there seems to be fewer stories to put the war into context, to help us wrap our minds around a most complex subject. Yes, the war is violent and perhaps can’t be won. Moreover, the suicide bomber’s psyche is impossible to comprehend. But we shouldn’t be seeing the war from an emotional distance.

Until nightly news producers realize these stories should be run, no matter how much coverage on a particular night is devoted to Iraq, America will continue its “numbing down,” a phrase Henninger used to describe what seems to be our country’s disposition as of late.

There have been more than 700 suicide bombings since 2003. The politics of war is important, but so are the facts and figures and the emotion. Somewhere in our coverage of the war, though, the more concrete has been muddled by doomsday accounts of where the war is headed.

Henninger suggests that the “effect of all this is disabling, perhaps for a long time.” He continues: “One example: Supporters of intervention in Darfur are upset that the international community hasn't responded. That hesitation may be morally unattractive, but one can hardly drain the limited wells of emotional and moral fortitude in Iraq and expect them to produce elsewhere. For the foreseeable future, Americans may decide they don't wish to expose themselves to similar drainings.”

I’m reminded of the old adage that where you stand depends on where you sit. In the case of coverage of the war, I readily admit to being partisan. I agree with Ricchiardi’s assertion that Americans are left without a complete account of the war, which she characterizes as “a prolonged, bloody war that is devouring billions of taxpayers’ dollars” (28). But I would contend it’s because the politics has trumped the human effect. To adequately cover a war, the media mustn’t aim to prove the futility of the war, nor should the media offer nothing more than harrowing accounts of death. That’s the job of politicians -- to sensationalize. The job of a journalist is to provide the numbers -- and then to contextualize those numbers in a story.

Until the media adopt a new plan in covering Iraq, I'm not shocked by this country’s apparent waning interest in the war. As Henninger notes, “Europe did after World War I, when people became hollowed out by repetitive exposure to violence and death -- real or manufactured. No one should be surprised if our shell-shocked population is reluctant any time soon to revisit the experience outside the realm of friends and family.”

Spreading the blame for VA Tech

2007-04-22T20:32:00.001-06:00

In the event of a massacre or tragedy, after reporting the facts, what is the news media’s role in analysis of the event? There has been a trend in media reporting on tragedies, stretching from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina to the shootings at Virginia Tech. News casters focus on how the event could have been prevented, or at least damage minimized, and then proceeds to place blame.
Civic journalism focuses on solving societal problems. How does placing blame solve problems? It is beneficial to analyze how a tragedy, such as the Virginia Tech shootings, could have been prevented. However, the source of a problem should not be laid on the shoulders of a handful of individuals. By placing blame, it gives the public a focal point for their rage. Especially in the case where the perpetrator is dead, it is easier to have a tangible person for placing blame and public outrage.
Anger is a rational response to a massacre, however public outrage impedes on solving problems. By saying one person’s actions allowed for this event to get out of control, it is easier for someone to say that would not be the way I act in the same situation. By blaming the university president for not locking down the campus after the first shootings in the dorm of Virginia Tech, it is easier for other university officials to say to themselves, “I would not act in that way – I would shut down the campus.”
This is not to say the media did not do their share to analyze the problem itself – which is more along the path of civic journalism. A beneficial use of time on public airwaves for the media would be to take a close look at the emergency response plans for universities across the nation. After the shootings at Columbine, the media focused some on this issue, however emergency plans for university campuses is vastly different from high schools because the campus is so stretched out. The media, after the shootings at Virginia Tech, did focus air time on this issue; however, it seems that newscasts were more consumed with placing blame.
Furthermore, placing blame on university officials, I would guess, makes them less cooperative in speaking with the media for purposes of analysis – beyond just releasing facts of the situation. In discussing emergency response strategies on the news, it would be beneficial to discuss with Virginia Tech officials how these strategies were developed – such as, if there was a formal plan for responding to an on-campus shooting, when was it developed, and if the faculty was well-informed concerning this plan and other emergency response plans.
Further analysis – that I did not encounter when watching the news – was the conflict concerning widely circulating a plan to respond to school shootings. For instance, if a shooter was familiar with an institution’s plan for response then he/she might be able to plan their shooting with more success – knowing that classrooms would be locked or that students were gathered in one area, etc…
When watching The View last week, shortly after the shootings, Rosie O’Donnell could do nothing but place blame. (For the record, The View was the first thing that came on when I woke up in the morning and I do not make a habit of watching it.) She was infuriated at the university officials for not locking down the university. Further she went on a rant about the university not using the fire alarm system to inform the entire campus about the first shooting. This frustrated me because she didn’t seem to understand that the fire alarms across campus would signal to students and faculty that they must exit the buildings and wait outside. In this case, it seems the shooter would have an easier target and be able to shoot more people since they would be amassed in a crowd outside the buildings.
Then Rosie went on to make the shootings a political issue. She ranted about gun control – which she has long been an advocate for. In this rant, however, she said she had given up on any hope of tighter gun control in the country. Rosie implied, in her rant, that this shooting was the fault of the NRA directly, and this interest group is so large that gun control is futile.
What was the purpose of Rosie’s rant, in this case? At first guess, she would seem to be attempting to guilt firearms advocates into changing their position. In doing so, however, she was convincing people who might advocate tighter gun controls that there was no hope. Every time one of her co-hosts tried to emphasize the importance of this issue, Rosie would insists that the power of the NRA makes any efforts ineffective. Aside from personal elation by yelling at the NRA and VA Tech officials, there was no worth in anything Rosie said.
The placing of blame – whether it be individual blame or turning the issue political – is only beneficial in providing an outlet for frustration and rage. This method of reporting does not serve the purpose of civic journalism. Reporters need to be focused on solving societal problems and not deciding who is at fault. Otherwise, journalists are not performing their duty of serving the public good and being a beneficial public informant in a democracy.

Which side of the bed are you on?

2007-04-22T17:37:00.000-06:00

The coverage of the Iraq war has begged a very personal question of journalists: what have they been doing in (em)bed?

When the war began, so did a new kind of journalism: embedded coverage. Journalists were planted within military units to report on the front line as it happened. This kind of reporting required an unprecedented partnership: journalists and the Department of Defense.

Much of this relationship was and is symbiotic, with mutual benefits. The embedded journalists have received unparalleled access to military actions and intelligence officers and insight into the war's mentality and morale. Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor said the only limitation on his access was abiding by the military's schedule. (CJR) Compared to the censorship of the Gulf War, the embedded journalists program is a dream of journalistic information. (BBC) In the meantime, the military has garnered a more informed public and political base, which are invaluable to its success. Clearly, the program is beneficial for the military, as the Pentagon hatched the concept for embedded reporting. (CJR and Zwirko)

Along with these benefits, however, there are rules, and there are criticisms.

The rules include not reporting on specific numbers of soldiers and equipment. Precise locations and future plans are also prohibited from publication. These regulations were designed to protect information from the former Iraqi government and, later, the insurgents. Such information, the military said, was critical for the soldiers' safety and for the war's success. The breaking of said rules was grounds for immediate dismissal as an embed. Very few embeds have been released for infractions.

What's more troubling for critics of the program is the proximity of journalists to the soldiers they're writing about. Critics say the reporters would be less likely to report objectively if they're relying on the soldiers for protection. (Zwirko) There have been accounts from embedded journalists to support both sides of this argument. For example, Jane Arraf of CNN said the military actually helped her report some of her most critical works. On the other hand, Chris Hondros of Getty Images tells about the attempted arrest of an embed who photographed insurgents attacking a plane. (CJR)

The limitation most noted by embedded journalists was difficulty talking to Iraqi people. (CJR) When the reporters did meet Iraqis, they were often unable to speak candidly. Another problem is the scope of embedded reporting. (Zwirko)

The BBC commissioned a study which looked at this very fear. The results of the study, published in June 2003, found that the biggest fault of embedded reporting was "sanitized" reporting, accounts that did not fully show the ugliness of the war. However, the study also found British cultural standards precipitated the sanitized reporting; it was not a result of bias or censorship. Another important note: nothing suggests the embedded journalists contributed significantly to misinformation or misleading reports. (BBC)

It seems as though the issue of embedded reporting remains far from settled. However, I'm not convinced it has to be. While many reporters remain embedded with the military, there are still freelancers and war correspondents outside this program. I think, collectively, journalists can offer a full picture and better information.

Columbia Journalism Review. The Embeds. November 2006.

BBC News. Iraq war journalism 'sanitised.' June 11, 2003. news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/3247267.stm

Dallas Morning News. Zwirko, Walt. Embedded journalists' reporting questioned. April 8, 2003.

BBC News. How embedded journalists are handling the war. March 25, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2885179.stm
http://foi.missouri.edu/jourwarcoverage/embeddedj.html

War is suffering, and so is our coverage of it.

2007-04-22T14:22:00.000-06:00

When people die, who is there to tell about it?
When countries are attacked, how will the world know?
When oppression comes not only from those who instill fear and hate, but also those who claim to battle them, who should demand answers?

The answer, of course, is journalists. But therein lies the problem. I don’t believe there is even a fraction of the reporting we need going on in Iraq, and unless something changes, I think there ever will be. Whether it’s because of funding, danger or a myriad of other reasons, we are not covering the war the way it should be covered, at least in the “mainstream” media outlets.
Remember Ernie Pyle? Yeah, that guy who gave his life to show Americans what war was really like? He evoked emotion. Sometimes it was anger, sometimes sadness and usually, he offered hope. We’re short on writers who do that for the Iraq struggle. One of the few who is actually trying to get at the realities of this deadly farce called a war is Michael Yon. He has been a self-sustaining journalist who is still embedded in Iraq. His dispatches are gritty, filled with content and emotion that cuts right to the core.
“Much more perilous is the often toxic nature of relations between journalists and the military, which has been steadily eroding since the start of this war,” Yon wrote. “When it comes to assigning blame for the public’s lack of support for this war, many are quick to point accusingly at journalists, but I cast no blame on any journalist for not being here.”
The reason Yon doesn’t blame journalists is because the conditions and the military have made it nearly impossible to report in the country. “Journalists who roam the battlefield with the troops and write freely for long periods are completely gone. That doesn’t mean good journalists are gone. There are plenty of those, but mostly they are somewhere else, or they only come to Iraq for quick tours.”
To me, this is a very sad fact, not just for writers, but also for the nation. It was the newspapers that constantly threw Vietnam into the public’s face, until they couldn’t take it any more. If there is anything that is notable about this “war,” it is the disturbing lack of protest. Yes, people are discontent, and even angry that our men and women are dying in the Middle East. But so few are taking to the streets, so many remain silent.
I think a very good solution to this is for publishers and editors of our major metros to start cranking up the heat. The more our generation is afraid to question authority, namely in the form of our religious and political leaders, the more we are all just sheep. As journalists it is our role to inform the people of what is going on, no matter how hard it is to stomach. I say put a picture of a dead soldier on the front page every damn day until we are out of that wretched country. The American people should demand this. War is gruesome, awful and hideously bad for nearly everyone involved in it.
If we are not showing this reality every day, someone’s not doing their job.

the longer we're here

2007-04-20T13:11:00.000-06:00

Anthony Shadid tells stories. He tells them so well, in fact, that he won the 2004 Pulitzer for International Reporting. He reports from Iraq for the Washington Post, and I saw him speak at Memorial Union in November after the release of his book Night Draws Near.

Night Draws Near is the story of Iraq’s people—their collective history as a nation, their culture, and their struggles since the American invasion. During his speech, Shadid told us about a few of the people he knew in Iraq, in particular a 15-year-old girl who wants to be a writer.

An hour after the speech, I ran out and got the book. (The speech was a pretty good advertisement, I must say.) I needed to read it because, well, I wanted to learn about Iraq, and I didn’t feel like I was getting enough from the newspapers.

Don’t get me wrong. The reporters in Iraq are doing a fine job. They put their lives in danger every day to report the war, and I’m grateful for that. I guess I just want more.

The reports I read are mostly numbers. Two soldiers killed in a helicopter crash. Forty dead after a suicide bombing. These are important numbers, of course, but what do they mean? Unless I saved every single newspaper clipping from every story I read, I would have no context for these figures. I would never know what life is like in Baghdad, or how these numbers have really affected our country and theirs.

It’s hard, when you’re a reporter, to get all this in a 20-inch story that’s due in a few hours. It took Anthony Shadid 448 pages and years of reporting and reflection to fit it all in. That failing is no one’s fault; it’s just the flaw of our medium. Because reporters are limited on time and space, and because they can only see what’s happening in one place, with one family or battalion at a time, the coverage is segmented and hard to understand.

When he won the Pulitzer for his reporting, Shadid addressed the Washington Post newsroom. He thanked his editors and sources, and then said something that I think sums up the challenge that reporters in Iraq face:

“The longer I’m here,” he said, “the less I understand the story.”

If he’s in the middle of it all, and he doesn’t understand it, how are we supposed to when we’re thousands of miles away?

The role of reporters in the Iraq war is to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense at all; to give context to a war that is being fought before their eyes; to give us the not just the numbers, but also the stories. That’s hard when no one understands it, and it gets harder the longer we’re there.

I don’t think anyone will understand this war for many, many years—after the last shots are fired, the newspapers have been collected and the books written. Then, we can take a step back with the eyes of hindsight and analyze how it all happened and what it means. Until then, reporters will write the best they can with what they see; we’ll try to make sense of it back home with whatever news they give us.

Journalism and Iraq

2007-04-20T10:13:00.000-06:00

A journalist’s role in Iraq is to report stories so as to bring the war back to the American people — just like a beat in any American city, this includes breaking news, enterprise pieces and even features.

It is even more important for reporters in Iraq to perform these duties, because the realities of the war are nearly impossible for regular citizens to see themselves. While it’s possible for someone to go witness a trial or sporting event by themselves, it’s not likely anyone would journey to Baghdad for a first-person view of the insurgency. This places journalists in a high-pressure situation, because they offer the only view of the war (ideally) untouched by the government.
Not only are journalists the country’s eyes and ears in Iraq, but journalists also serve the role as interpreter. At any given moment in Iraq, several important events are taking place, and it’s the job of journalists to put these events into context for its readers, viewers and listeners. In a time when the Bush administration has become increasingly tight-lipped, this is a role that is vital to Americans becoming better informed about the war and, more importantly, the United States’ place in the Middle East.

Another role journalists have in Iraq is that of being patriotic — and not the Olympic “America’s-the-best-place-on-earth” kind — but rather, showing courage to continue in the democratic process of finding and reporting the story. A free and active press is integral to Democracy, and seeing the product of important, life-threatening work by journalists can be encouraging to a public that is generally uninformed on world issues. Journalists must also relieve panic from the front by placing the risks talked about at home (which often come from politicos with agendas) into context. This is especially useful, since most of what people hear outside of the media is from politicians with a vested interest in the war.

Unfortunately, a journalist’s role in Iraq has also come to include being safe. Experiences like that of Jill Carroll’s have become increasingly common. Iraq is a country that has come to be characterized by instability, and many journalists have paid the price for doing their job. Many news organizations have taken on private security guards for their Iraq correspondents, and have taken refuge in “safe” areas of Iraq to eliminate as much of the threat as possible. However, as many precautions have been taken, violence seems to slowly be winning in the battle against journalism.

“The relentless violence in Iraq has seriously compromised coverage of arguably the most important story in the world today,” Sherry Ricchiardi writes in her AJR article, “Obstructed View.” “Certain facets of the conflict remain exasperatingly elusive or, at best, thinly reported. The media’s vital role as eyewitness has been severely limited.” Ricchiardi continues that security concerns have become so great, and so costly, that correspondents are uninformed and in increasing peril. She reports that Iraq has been ranked the most dangerous place for journalists for the fourth consecutive year, and this has meant that journalists can’t travel to places on their own for reporting, greatly hindering the story that is being told back here in the United States.

This increased danger has meant high security costs for news organizations, Ricchiardi writes, which has meant many news organizations don’t hang around. There are fewer correspondents and fewer news organizations in Iraq every day, and with the violence likely to get worse, the future doesn’t look bright.

An interesting column

2007-04-03T10:55:00.000-06:00

I thought this might be an appropriate column to post, since we discussed the Tribune's sale in class yesterday. It's written by the Tribune's John Kass.

News about us is just part of the news

Published April 3, 2007

A.fter a week of a relaxing family vacation, watching the cherry blossoms pop in Washington, D.C., I came back to work to the news that Tribune Co. had been sold and the Cubs are up for sale.

As I wandered through the newsroom Monday morning, a colleague stopped me with a question. I figured it would have something to do with anxiety and all the other emotions running through all of us employed by an organization where big news was made about some awfully big changes around here.

She was uncertain, but not about all that stuff.

"Have you talked to [Mr. So-and-So] about the lawsuit?" she asked, meaning a lawsuit involving someone close to a powerful local politician.

The Cubs are on the block, Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, had been purchased, but what she was interested in was Mr. So-and-So (not his real name, because if I printed his real name while she's still working on the story, she'd have good reason to kill me).

"Well," she asked. "Have you talked to Mr. So-and-So? Are you going to speak to him?"

Her desk was piled with documents and other papers, and bits of notes and scraps of ideas and old phone numbers written in margins, and electronic nuggets of information on the computer screen before her.

She wasn't intent on Tribune Co. news, or the Cubs, or Sam Zell, the Chicago business tycoon who put the Tribune deal together to take the company private. She wasn't consumed by any of that, but by something else: reporting a story about powerful people.

The reason I'm telling you about this exchange -- one of hundreds like it around here every day -- is because that's what we've been doing for more than a century. The Chicago Tribune tells other stories exceedingly well, but we don't tell our own story very well at all.

Here's what we do: report and analyze and confront the powerful who don't like being confronted. We write about what we've learned, and sometimes we hope to entertain you along the way. We're compelled to do this, as all reporters everywhere are compelled, to find out the what and the how and the why of things.

So the reporter isn't going to lower the demands she places on herself, and neither will others, no matter what changes are made on the business side. Whether this deal with Zell makes business sense is something I can't judge. I'm not in business. In the short term, the deal ends the anxiety in the newsroom and the gloominess that comes with uncertainty over possibly being purchased by people who don't understand Chicago.

Now, things are certain: A Chicago guy has bought himself a media company that puts out the Chicago Tribune.

The other news is that they'll sell the Cubs, which, as a White Sox fan, doesn't bother me much. I've already had my revenge on the Cubs fans around here when the White Sox lent me their 2005 World Series trophy and I took it upstairs to the boardroom and dared the executives to touch it, and they prudently refused to tempt the fates.

But the baseball team's sale is in the future, and the sale of the Tribune has already taken place, and what's important today is that the paper continues. You'll find dismal Opening Day baseball stories in the sports section, and Police Supt. Phil Cline's resignation, forced by Mayor Richard Daley because somebody had to fall for the videotaped beating of that petite Northwest Side bartender by a vicious, drunken cop.

Though changes have been announced, this remains the Chicago Tribune.

This is the paper that has been the one constant in an ever-changing city. It is the paper that fought slavery and supported Lincoln, and later bickered with other presidents and gangsters and political bosses. It is the paper that told Nixon to resign. It is the newspaper that called on another president to send a politically independent fed to Chicago to go after Al Capone, and Elliot Ness arrived and did his work. This is the newspaper that, only a few years ago, angered the Illinois political establishment by calling for a politically independent federal prosecutor to be sent to Chicago, to ferret out the political corruption plaguing the state's taxpayers. U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald has been quite busy since he arrived.

On the outer walls of Tribune Tower, there are fragments set in stone of temples and monuments taken from historic sites from all over the world. These are not mere souvenirs or trophies. They represent greatness and the great ideas behind them. Writers and editors pass these reminders each day and can't help but be informed by them, and we pass inscriptions carved into the walls of the Tower's lobby.

My favorite is quite brief, and it is set above a door leading to the elevators. I read this quote from Lord Thomas Macaulay every day and still get goose bumps: "Where there is a free press the governors must live in constant awe of the opinions of the governed."

But stones from palaces and temples and quotes don't make a newspaper. All that can change. What makes this a paper I'm proud to work for are people like my colleagues, like that woman who asked me the question, and who will keep asking about the how and why of things in Chicago.

----------

jskass@tribune.com

Journalism according to Publius

2007-04-02T08:53:00.000-06:00

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
~Publius, The Federalist Papers Number 57

While this document, most likely authored by Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, never mentions journalism, previous and subsequent Federalist publications make the mention of “external” controls a clear reference to the freedom of the press. The is the most essential role of journalists is to fill the need laid forth by this quote: a secondary monitor on those in power.

The idea that the Constitution of the United States of America was set forth in such a superior manner to be a self-containing, corruption-free unit, operating in the interests of the people is simply not a reality. One look at the ills exposed by the investigative journalism, taking place now, illustrates the importance of the watchdog. Often, internal governmental review occurs only after journalism brings the error to light.

Despite my skepticism, harsh statements and anti-establishment tendencies, I love this nation. I became a journalist with the ideal of helping grease the cogs that make the clockwork of democracy tick. In high school I thought politics would satiate my feelings of obligation to serve the nation. I quickly realized a major flaw with this profession: I didn’t like the “politics” involved. The every day vying for approval and popularity associated with teenage girls isn’t too far from the workings on Capitol Hill. I found myself distanced from the squabbles and drama of my friends. Rather, I observed the intricacies of the game and learned only to give advice to those within the system.

This analogy might appear trivial, however, I find that this describes the role I play as a journalist today: the proverbial “fly on the wall” if you will. I search for that which needs to be exposed and expose it. I analyze the intricacies of policy, searching to educate people and illuminate the situation.

Another sector of American society that needs to be watched by journalists has emerged in the face of modernity. Yes, once again I am dragging “big businesses” into my debates. This sector didn’t exist in the days of Hamilton and Madison, but had it been the lobbying-superpower that it is today, the two probably would have addressed the issue in their infamous papers.

Enron and Tyco proved to America, if nothing else, that capitalism does not instill ethics in corporations. A secondary check on the power and control of these mega companies is essential. Journalists almost missed the boat with Enron, but eventually they hit the target, sinking the ship. If journalists are to serve the public well, they must investigate both the governmental and businesses sectors.

Perhaps Publius did address the need of a watchdog for corporations in The Federalist Papers Number 57. In an abstract sort of way that pits the haves against the have-nots in a society filled with middle-class workers.

“It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

Oh Crap!

2007-03-31T16:12:00.000-06:00

In an “Oh, crap!” moment over spring break, I realized I forgot to write this entry. It got lost in the midterms and essays all due right before the week off, and somehow made its way out of my mind. I’m mad at myself because I had what I thought to be a solid argument as to why there is no need to credential journalists.
Looking back at some of the big-name scandals in recent years, the Blairs, Glasses and Leopolds of the world all got their chops busted big time as soon as it was discovered that they were fabricating sources, facts and stories. Now tell me, how would this have changed if they had been “officially credentialed” by some review board?
They all worked at highly-esteemed papers across the country and knew what the consequences would be if they ever got caught. The fact that they chose to continue with the dishonest behavior, to me signals that there was nothing that could be done prior to them lying that would have stopped them.
What it would take for these review boards to create any feeling of relevance would to catch reporters well before their stories go into publication. The boards would need some sort of department of pre-crime where deadly accurate psychics predict what is going to happen before it actually does. (Sorry for ripping an idea out of “Minority Report”). Once the lie is out there, it’s impossible to fully take it back.
Since the previous scenario would be impossible to enact, there would be no practical use for these boards other than to waste papers’ and journalists’ time. Liars and fabricators that get caught are already effectively blackballed by the industry and are shunned by those in the profession. It’s the same thing that would happen to a doctor who loses his medical license or teacher that gets her teaching certificate ripped up.
By creating these boards, it would, for a short while at least, appease the masses that claim the news medium have no more credibility or honesty. But soon, they would realize the boards do nothing to prevent new cheaters and liars from acting, and the beat of their drums would sound again.
The only reason left for creating review boards would be to appease the gigantic egos and quiet the incessant whining of some who have gone through years of training in journalism school. While I’m proud of what I have accomplished and learned in my time at MU, I think it is ridiculous to suggest that there aren’t people out there who couldn’t competently do the job we do. As proof, there have been many successful people with no journalism degree, such as Peter Jennings or even my sports editor, Greg Bowers who have been more than competent in their jobs.
Let’s put the effort into checking stories more thoroughly when they come through copy desks and randomly checking sources, so we can be proactive for once.

Equality

2007-03-24T13:47:00.000-06:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of whether or not journalists should be certified all week. I’m still going with my original answer of no for several reasons—there are many great journalists without educations, it would be hard to decide a way to measure whether someone should be certified, etc.---but I’m not as sure about it as I was Monday.
I’ve heard the notion before that journalism school is a waste of time. Newspapers hire kids off the street to come in and write stories and work their way up. Maybe I’m being selfish, but I don’t want my degree to not mean anything. I don’t want to be held in the same esteem as a kid off the street or someone with no journalism background who creates a website to rant and rave about Mizzou sports.

The good thing, though, and the reason I still don’t feel a pressing need for certification, is that I think we ARE given more merit. I don’t feel threatened that I am going to lose my spot on press row to a blogger, not if I’m working for a newspaper with any kind of a reputation in a community.

Maybe that’s just me being naïve, but I don’t think so. It’s up to a newspaper to earn the public’s trust in their communities enough to be held above less qualified potential competition. Likewise, it is up to me to show that my education was worthwhile, through my work, not by holding up a certification card. I am confident that I can do that, and my work will be representative of the first-class education I have received.

Wednesday, the topic was whether we, as journalists, are “more equal” than others. My answer is simple: absolutely. When I cover a sporting event, I have credentials that give me the opportunity to go where the average person can’t. That pass obligates coaches, players, and whoever else, to talk to me in a way they may not feel obligated to talk to a fan in the crowd. In the same way, politicians and government officials are obligated to talk to reporters on the news side.

Certainly, then, we are more equal. It’s a privilege, and it’s a responsibility. We have to ask the questions that those who don’t have the opportunity to do so would ask. When public figures deserve to be called into question, we have to be there to do that. We have to act like their equal, if we feel below them or intimidated by them, we won’t ask the questions that need to be asked in order to show the public the truth about a corrupt cop or a lying politician.

To do our jobs, we have to be equals, especially in our own minds. By considering ourselves to be "more equal" we are not being cocky or putting ourselves on a pedestal, we are just acknowledging the truth.

A plastic card could say a lot

2007-03-24T12:15:00.000-06:00

Blair, Glass, Leopold, we know their names; most of us probably despise them. And it is because of people like them, and of course bloggers too, that I think journalists should be required to have “credentials.” I think the morals and ethics of journalism in today’s world have to a great degree become a distant memory. As all our studies on blogging and the new media revolution have shown, many believe that anyone can be a journalist.
Are we okay with this? Are all the years we spent pounding into our brains the qualities that will make us thrive as writers simply a waste? Well, when those less-than-savory characters fabricate a story or get their facts wrong, it can sometimes seem so.
But for many journalists it is a point of pride that we’re not licensed or credentialed. Many think that to do so would be a ghastly violation of what we call a free press. In the past I may have agreed with this. But too much has changed these days, honesty and commitment to truth are not so valued, it seems. Trained journalists could gain so much by having some form of licensing or requirements before working for a news outlet.
First of all, it would make it much easier to blacklist the scoundrels that taint the name of journalism. If you fabricate a story, or maliciously lie, your license could be taken away. This would mean the end of the road, no chance of making a buck as a writer and justice would be served.
Next, a form of journalistic licensing would protect the integrity of our profession. No more would you have frauds such as Jason Leopold lurking around the newsroom. If you go to school, put in the time and effort required, you can work for a news outlet. I don’t think it should be any other way. Perhaps I’m partial because I went through the hell of the Missourian, but I’m sure most true journalists would agree. Along these lines, bloggers that term themselves “journalists” would become a rarity. I find it totally absurd that some guy sitting in front of his computer in his underwear is allowed to even be considered in the same sentence as journalists.
We work extremely hard for our profession. I don’t think any real journalist would have any objection to licensing that requires a journalism degree to work in a newsroom. If someone does object, it might be a good idea to do a little fact-checking in their stories.

License to Report

2007-03-24T09:07:00.000-06:00

We live in messy, complicated world. The sheer amount of information affecting the average person is mind-boggling. Much of that information is quite esoteric: Making sense of financial data or policy numbers with which journalists and readers are confronted each day, and doing so responsibly, can be well beyond readers, even when that information has a direct effect on their lives. And the people we pay to make sense of this mess for us have the power to shape how we act (assuming we act on information). So, it seems pretty reasonable for us to demand some sort of guarantee that the people to whom we entrust the arduous task of sorting out and delivering important, contextualized information will do so well and responsibly. A case, you might say, for licensing journalists. It’s in the public interest.

There’s another argument for licensing journalists. The news industry has data to show that readers and viewers tend to view all journalists as one monolithic block, unified in its efforts, intentions and ethics. (I’ll break here while you chuckle.) Media savvy viewers/readers and news junkies excepted, many news consumers understand neither the vast differences in values inherent to different media (i.e., the broadcast news ethic vs. the newspaper ethic vs. the magazine ethic) nor the vast differences in practices among organizations within each medium. (Though viewers/readers certainly do have a in inkling about what goes on inside a news organization – “This paper is so conservative” or “This station is so sensationalized” – they don’t tend to have a grasp on the competing theories of journalism that generate the results they see.) Because readers/viewers tend to see all journalists as representative of a unified group, the folly of one journalist damages the reputation and credibility of all journalists. If credibility is the journalist and news organizations’ most valuable asset and one journalists’ folly can damage all journalists, then it’s in the interest of journalists and news organizations to license journalists and make sure they conform to and uphold a set of values common to the endeavor.

So that, in my view, is what licensing journalism would solve: It would be a guarantee that the people we pay to analyze and deliver our information are competent and it would help protect the credibility of and trust in journalism overall, which is at a low ebb. But let’s look at some of problems with credentialing journalists.

First, there’s this question: Who’s going to license journalists and how will it be done? In other words, who’s interests will be represented in selecting who’s a journalist and who is not? After all, the entire idea of licensing journalists is predicated on keeping out some people who want to be journalists. The government can’t be involved in licensing journalists, right? That would be a clear case of censorship: The government doesn’t want person X to become a journalist and denies person X his/her credentials. But what happens when journalists are licensed by a media body? That body will inevitably be controlled by monies interests and readers will certain know that. It’ll be a tough sell to convince readers/viewers that corporate censorship is any better than the government variety.

Another question: Who enforces the licensing of journalists? If a lawyer or doctor practices without a license, they’ll be thrown in jail. Would journalists want to be pulled away from their keyboard in cuffs for reporting without a license? That seems dangerous.

These are big problems. There’s also the fact that licensing or distinguishing journalists would require homogenizing practices and ethics within journalism – a major threat to the robustness of ideas in journalism. Overall, licensing journalists or making them formally “more equal” than others has dangerous consequences for journalism.

Unleash the Watchdogs

2007-03-23T22:24:00.000-06:00

I don't think any industry has ever been as clueless about its future role as journalism is today. The telegraph after the invention of the telephone, I suppose, could also be lumped into the same category.

Unlike those telegraph operators, though, I think journalists still have things they can/should do that no one else can/will do. and if we can do those things better than anyone else, suddenly all the hand-wringing and bots of industry-wide depression (see: Romenesko) are suddenly wholly and fully moot.

We need to look at the new media landscape like a failing TV station looking to make a killing. We need to find out what is and is not happening in the market, taking into account all the avenues for communication and news delivery, find out what's not happening and exploit it. Shall we?

Getting news "first" is no longer neccessarily possible, nor is it important. Bloggers, TV stations, and -- hell -- even interest groups or companies or other PR machines will get the information out faster than us. Entertaining our audience is equally worthless; because of the sheer volume of stuff(TM) on the Internet(TM), the best we can hope for is to not seem to far out of touch with what's actually entertaining. It's also pointless to act as a catch-all repository for the major events of the day; Yahoo and Google have a monopoly on that market, with niche sites reaching out to interested parties across geographic markets.

So those are out. What's left is essentially two of the roles as defined by Kovach and Rosenstiel in the Elements of Journalism:
1) "a discipline of verification"
2) "An independent monitor of power"

In an interview with E&P, The Seattle Times' David Boardman backed up that second assertion with strong support of increasing investigative reporting in newspapers, saying the effect would help the bottom line and newspapers' relevance. "You’re not going to see Bill Gates do it or the bathrobe-wearing bloggers."

And both these disciplines -- hard-edged watchdog reporting coupled with a tireless effort to verify fact -- helps add a valuable layer in world that is being increasingly created by advertisers on behalf of their clients. The ability to cut through the crap they try to foist off as truth or try to ignore is going to become increasingly valuable. The ability to force an institution to address something they'd rather sweep under the rug, to call statistics from the latest press release into question, to poke holes in the spotty logic of a blogging public too caught up in the scandal of the day: these are the skills of journalists in the world we're heading into.

I love to turn a phrase as much as the next guy, but that's no longer our role. Snark is available for free. Lampooning culture is the essence of many a successful website. Style and prose are a dime a dozen. We, unfortunately, have to realize that the content of our work is now king, that a feature story is rarely going to cut it anymore.

Again, this industry has to find what it can do that nobody else is doing, and do it so well no one ever tries to compete. To verify and to investigate; those are the things we can do that will let us continue to be viable. and if we do those things, people won't talk about journalists in the same way we (never) talk about telegraphs.

Roles and Responsibilities

2007-03-23T21:36:00.000-06:00

Journalists assume a laundry-list of roles: watchdogs, investigators, moderators, entertainers, analysts, informers, editors, commentators, and advertisers. In many ways we are community activists, agenda-setters, and voices for the voiceless. We are public servants, keepers of public record, protectors of democracy, and promoters of public dialogue. In large part, we are defined by the journalism we produce and the function that our journalism serves for society.

Yet for all of these roles – roles of the utmost importance and impact – they come with no license, no certification, and no credentials. Nor are they by any means exclusive to those with training; the profession’s poster boy, Joseph Pulitzer, is a testament to as much.

Nevertheless, journalism is undoubtedly given the distinction of a profession – an esteem typically reserved for those occupations entailing extensive training, mastery of specific and specialized knowledge, and, more often that not, formal licensure or certification. With such professional status and recognition comes the journalism industry’s concern in the rise of citizen, grassroots, and participatory journalism; efforts which emphasize the inclusion of the general audience in the creation of news content. Such models of journalism, and the technologies that have aided their evolution, seek to break down the barrier between professional and amateur journalist and further blur the lines of just who is capable of practicing journalism. Dan Gillmor comments on these consequences in his book We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.

It in this debate over the distinction of who is a journalist that the answer to the journalist’s role can be best understood. The overarching role of the journalist, first time citizen contributor or career New York Times correspondent, is all of the aforementioned functions from the opening. It is to use news, in the broadest of interpretations, for any one of those many powerful purposes through any one of a number of ways; to rank each function’s value in some sort of hierarchy would be as insufficient as it would be impossible.

However, the role of the professional journalist then does deviate from that of the recreational – the professional’s role is to do so responsibly. This obligation is well engrained in the institution. Through education, professional associations, and the profession’s deep-rooted culture, notions of fairness, accuracy, objectivity, transparency, and accountability are upheld.

The citizen journalist, who quite literally practices journalism, is held to no such standards. The information they produce is consumed with no such expectation for ethics and the degree of trustworthiness readers place in it is reflected by this.

Why we as professional journalists worry so much over their encroachment on our sacred ground then is beyond me. So what if our society has an appetite for entertaining glorified gossip and the speculation of truth; it’s good for our imaginations and the development of good judgment. At the end of the day, when those same readers want to know who to vote for in the upcoming election or what the mayor had to say about the recent weather emergency, they turn to us, the professionals.

An appropriate analogy can be drawn in the field of medicine. In theory, anyone can practice medicine. Joe Schmoe can treat a wound and Jane Doe can administer a physical. But when it comes to diagnosing a potentially cancerous growth or delivering a child, most if not all would opt for the experience, access to resources, and authority of the professional.

So long as we uphold the quality of our product and the processes that go into it its formation, professional journalists will always have the upper-hand in the one thing that matters most in our profession: truth. No matter how critical or cynical the public may pretend to be with the “media,” they nevertheless continue to grant implicit trust in what we report as truth.

While public relations tries its best to disrupt this trust through the disguising of propaganda and a few bad seeds try their best to ruin it for the rest of us (see: Jayson Blair, Jason Leopold, etc.), the credibility of the profession remains intact if not largely indelible. This isn’t to say irreversible damage can’t be done over the course of time; wide-scale disregard for these very roles as professionals, and the principles that police them, would certainly do the trick. But after all, there is a certain protection that comes from the role of the professional journalist: it’s such an important role, it can’t be readily replaced. Not by the internet and certainly not by an army of untrained novices.

I'm a fan. Sue me.

2007-03-23T21:33:00.000-06:00

If you've ever spent a lot of time at the Missourian sports desk, you know there are a few rules drilled into a writer's head.

Most of them are fairly simple and easy to follow, rules like "Team is an it" or "No hugging at the sports desk". There is one rule, however, which I have trouble following, one I have voiced by displeasure about.

No fans at the sports desk.

Yeah, I know that sports writers are supposed to be objective and not let their rooting biases get in the way of coverage. I understand and agree with that. When I cover events, I don't cheer for a team to win, I cheer for the best story. That objectivity is what makes our coverage worth paying for and differentiates us from bloggers and Bill Simmons. But when Greg Bowers tells us that we shouldn't be fans of any sports team, whether we cover it or not...

I can't help but disagree.

If I were a fan of MU sports, that would obviously be a problem. When the basketball Tigers won games this year, I interviewed them with a bland disposition. And when they lost, I used the exact same disposition. If they, or anyone around them, cared to notice, I would hope they would say Sam and I covered the team objectively. I rarely wore any black or gold. Heck, my collection of MU shirts has been relegated to undershirt or "Oh my God it's laundry day and I have nothing else to wear" status.

I would hope that nobody, especially my editor, would think I am a fan of MU basketball. Any and all pro-MU leanings I may have had were muted this past season. Partly because of some of the stress caused by covering the team, but mostly because I made sure to act professionally and objectively at all times.

However, I don't see what the problem is if I openly cheer for the Chicago Cubs to win. They aren't one of the teams the Missourian covers, nor are they even in a league the paper covers. The same thing goes for the Bears, Bulls and to a lesser-degree the Blackhawks. It's not as if my coverage of the MU men's basketball team was ever compromised by my love of the Cubs. (That's not exactly true. When I got a text message during a November MU game that Alfonso Soriano signed with the Cubs, I think I blacked out for at least five minutes.) If anything, talking sports with some of the players was a good way to get to know them better, and for them to see me in a way other than a guy with a recorder and notebook.

But more importantly, it's the passion of being a fan that made me want to be a sports writer. I love being a part of a good debate with somebody who knows as much as I do and can defend their points. Every day it seems I get into some Cubs-Cardinals debate with my writing partner Sam. We both know a ton about both teams and love ripping each other on rather minor statements. Yes, when I said Alfonso Soriano could be a five-tool player this season I deserved to get made fun of. But when Sam said on Wednesday that Tony La Russa was the smartest manager in baseball I let him have it. And, by the way, I think the events of the last couple days have probably proved Sam wrong about La Russa's intelligence.

It's that love of sports that continues to drive me to work as hard as I occasionally do. I like hearing a player explain why he didn't call that time-out or why his coach put him in that position to fail. And it's a curiosity that I don't think some robot could have. Sports aren't like politics or anything "serious" where every person holds a stake in what is going on. I know that in some way, the things Matt Harris or my cousin Marc currently report on have an affect on me. But those same things are drier and more academic, things that aren't nearly as exciting as a buzzer-beating 3-pointer by Gilbert Arenas or a perfectly-executed free kick by Cristiano Ronaldo.

If I am forced to stop being a fan of my teams, I will gradually lose that passion for the rest of sports. See, it's my love of the Cubs that inspired me to become more of a fan of baseball. Because of them, I like knowing what is going on in the rest of the National League. Same goes for all the other teams I mentioned and their respective leagues.

Sportswriting is a tough business, one that a lot of people would like to get into. But many of them don't really know what it truly takes to be professional. Many of those charlatans find a way to get into the lower rungs of the business, but realize their skills aren't adequate to stay in it. At this point I think my skills are more than adequate. One of those skills is the ability to turn off that fandom, so to speak. I have seen reporters and other people in press boxes cheer. It makes me nauseous and makes their newspaper look amateurish.

Any good sportswriter, at heart, is a fan. But that same sportswriter also knows they have to turn that side of themselves off and view the games they cover objectively. Telling a sportswriter not to be a fan is not trusting their professionalism. More importantly, it's taking away the reason they got into the business.

no need for a news council

2007-03-23T21:25:00.001-06:00

Something that sets journalism apart from other professions is the lack of a licensing board, or formal disciplinary procedures. The “Amish” method of shunning journalists who cross the line is what prevails today. News councils have been proposed and formed as a way to put professional checks on journalists ethical missteps. One of these was formed in Minnesota in the 1960s.
The Minnesota News Council is made up of 24 volunteers and a chairperson. Twelve are from the public, and the rest represent the media. Media members do not represent specific news outlets when they sit on the board. According to the Minnesota news council website, it was formed in response to the dwindling faith the public had in the media. The council fields complaints and rules on cases where journalists are accused of abusing the public trust. The Council has received more than 1,680 complaints since 1971. Of these, about half have been upheld and half have been rejected. This seems to be a costly and time consuming way to find that only half of complaints filed are legitimate.
In the March/April 1997 Columbia Journalism Review, Mike Wallace argued for news councils, saying that there is an anger toward the press grown out of journalists’ arrogance and dismissal of the public. He suggested that it was “irresponsible: for a news organization to “refuse to play” if a complaint was lodged against them with a news council. It has been 10 years and news councils have not caught on. Minnesota is one of the more well known ones, where anyone can apply for membership.
There are two very good reasons that news councils have not become the norm. These are: there are legal resources for misbehaving journalists, and shunning is pretty powerful. You can argue that the reason there is no formal, professional disciplinary procedures is that when journalists do something wrong, they are usually facing a libel suit. Because the protection of the press is enshrined in Constitutional law, it is appropriate for the punishment of journalists to happen in the courts. Discipline of journalists by some in-house, professional standard is unnecessary. There’s nothing wrong with the current double threat of legal action and professional shaming. News councils would only fill a need that the law and the profession have already taken care of. Shunning is particularly effective because it is a powerful threat. What purpose does being found ethically guilty by a news council serve when you have been blacklisted for employment? Moreover, there are much better ways to regain public trust, namely by being better champions of the public good. Fulfilling this role makes news councils obsolete in their mission and procedures.

News Councils: a good idea . . . in theory

2007-03-23T21:25:00.000-06:00

Journalists have a lot of jobs. They must be watchdogs, gatekeepers and investigators. They also are charged with informing the public of the news in a fair and accurate way. With these jobs comes a good deal of power. Journalists, to a certain extent, determine what is worth paying attention to on any given day. So it makes sense that such a powerful group of people is checked up on periodically.

Journalists work on the assumption that the public is reading and trusting the work they publish, so they should be held responsible should the public call this work into question. A news council can be a method for members of the public to address the media with concerns as well as a method for ensuring more ethical journalistic practices. The potential good a news council can do is great, though problems do exist in how such a group would work in practice.

Many studies today show distrust in newspapers growing as readership declines. Countless efforts are being made to reverse this trend, several focusing on the Internet and other forms of multimedia to engage larger audiences and get people involved in the news. Yet while this may be bringing people to the newspapers, trust and confidence people have in the reporting must be strong in order to maintain the audience.

“ . . . Journalists cannot restore public trust and credibility alone, any more than any other profession could do that. They need help from citizens . . . .”(Hamer and Silha, The Seattle Times).

This help can come in the form of news councils. Members of the media and the public form the few councils that exist in the U.S. today, including those in Minnesota and Washington. Citizens are encouraged to bring their problems before the council in a hearing.

This gets communities involved. It shows the public that journalists are listening and that measures are being taken to hold newspapers and other media outlets accountable.

An example is a case brought before the Minnesota council by a local mayor claiming an editorial run in the Star Tribune inaccurately portrayed his actions. The council decided to uphold what was run in the paper, but at least the issue was discussed and some attention was brought to the concern of this person - even if he was a public figure (Brown, Star Tribune).

News councils can serve as monitors of journalism. Reporters are supposed to be monitors too, informing the public of what they uncover. If reporters can take on this role, then they should be willing to be monitored themselves. It would promote greater transparency and a more trusting public.

Inevitably, problems arise when considering the possibility of news councils. The few that there are today are state organizations. But maybe it would be better to have local councils that are more aware of the media in the area and more knowledgeable of the news being covered there. Or maybe too many councils would be ineffective.

Along with where the councils would be formed is who will make up these councils? It makes sense to include members of the media, but there is an obvious conflict of interest there. Regular citizens need to be part of the process, they are the reason news councils are so necessary. But are these people qualified to be making judgments about the ethics of journalism?

And when a news council does make a decision, and determines that, for example, a newspaper was wrong in its actions, how will that paper be held responsible? For the paper’s sake, it probably should comply and come forward to apologize or print a correction, but legally it does not have to do anything. It can stick by what it did and ignore the council’s decision, seemingly making the council useless.

These problems all come about when considering how a news council could actually work. So maybe it’s slightly ideal to think that many news councils will be created or that those in existence will have much of an impact on the world of journalism. But it’s also ideal of reporters to think that their work matters and that people are paying attention to it. And in the way of achieving that ideal, trying to make news councils work could offer some help.

What kind of dog...

2007-03-23T21:01:00.000-06:00

As Thomas Jefferson once said the press is supposed to be the watchdog of the American government. But as my dad often likes to say in this post-Watergate era the press has become the lapdog of those it favors in government and the attack dog of those it dislikes.

This criticism of the press isn’t limited to one of my father’s favorite sayings. There are many people who don’t trust the press, which they see as all too often conforming to a liberal agenda.
In a 1997 interview in the Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 1997) endorsing news councils, Mike Wallace commented about the state of American media.

“There is growing skepticism, it seems to me, about all our credible institutions. There’s been skepticism about the press for two-hundred odd years since we became a nation. But now there seems a different quality, at least from any that I’ve understood in my lifetime There seems to be a genuine anger toward the press that I’ve not seen previously,” Wallace said.

Although some debate this criticism, in the newsrooms I’ve been present in the agenda of the editors is often clear. This agenda may not be the agenda of the American people, but what the editors, who are far more “educated” by their own standards, than the average public. The public distrust of today’s media can be attributed to the perceived bias and the belief that journalist are out for their own interests not the interests of the public.

Ten years later, Wallace’s vision of the news council has not been achieved and the sentiment of the American people toward journalists is very much the same. Recent crises such as those of Jason Blair have reinforced negative opinions about journalists from the public. Wallace’s assessment of the media also mentioned the increasing divide between journalists and the public.

“I think that we are dismissive of public concerns. I think that there is a certain degree of arrogance. There is a certain degree of elitism in the press that didn’t use to be there.”

Minnesota and Washington have established news councils to battle this problem. In Washington the news council’s mission is “to help maintain public trust and confidence in the news by promoting, fairness, accuracy and balance, and by creating a fourm where the pubic and the news media can engage each other in examining standards of journalistic fairness and accountability.”

At first the idea of a news council did not appeal to me, but after some contemplation I realized the positive role they could play for newspapers today. News councils provide an opportunity for the public to gain trust in the media, as well as to serve a more active role in the media. The Washington News Council emphasizes that though media organizations' participation is voluntary, it helps to promote trust of the media.

It is unclear whether or not news councils are the answer for the lack of trust that people possess in today’s media, but it is one of the viable solutions being presented. It is clear that the public does not have the degree of trust in newspapers they once did. The accountability of news councils could both help the cause of journalists and help the public they serve.

Let the public decide

2007-03-23T19:49:00.001-06:00

In France they call us “The Fourth Estate.” In the United States, we’re sometimes jokingly called “The Fourth Branch of Government.” Both terms symbolize the way journalists are viewed and treated. Journalists are the people’s aristocracy –I sincerely believe that.
I pull back and say I don’t believe all people are journalists –nor do I believe that when you graduate from a journalism school you become one. I believe with time, good work, and the cumulative effort to make a difference in your work you become a journalist. This is why English had a wonderful way of creating words to describe job positions within journalism: reporter, editor, designer, photographer, graphic artist, sports reporter, etc.
I believe people throw the term journalist around too much. I sometimes think I am in the minority when I say this.
In 1841, philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote this passage to describe the media. He said, “…in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, —very momentous to us in these times. Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent writing, democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.”
I quote this because I think this reflects the question of news credentialing, and journalists’ position with the masses and the people in power.
I don’t believe news credentialing is necessary even in this world of mass media we live in because the one thing that journalists have that non-journalists don’t have is mass-credibility. Where when a person write you take at their word almost 100 percent of the time. People like Peter Jennings, Nick Kristof, David Stout or Ted Koppel who produced works that meant something to the general populace.
News credentials aren’t necessary because there would be no way to punish someone for violating the credentials, but most importantly – the people can decide. The readers and listeners of the world do just exactly that – and they let you know when you get something wrong. Oh, goodness they let you know when you get something wrong.
Slate’s Jacob Weisberg wrote this statement on the advent of the Internet regarding “Who is a Journalist?” --- “At another level, the ability for readers to respond to the mainstream press is raising standards of accuracy, care, and professionalism. Simply put, you can't get away with being lazy or careless anymore, because too many self-appointed patrolmen are trying to catch you jaywalking.”
We represent the people, and because there are so many voices out there, I think it’s important for us to do an even increasingly better job being aspiring journalists. There’s a ton of people out there now writing from their bedrooms about everything from latest sock trends to politics. For us to become journalists, we need to rise above the mundane and provide items that the masses can react to – to get emotional about.
That’s why, in the end, the readers en-masse turn to us angrily to get into the deepest reaches of our government – why The New York Times and Washington Post is breaking national political stories and our local papers are unveiling local scandals.
Not everyone is a journalist. We can aspire to be one – and should let the public decide.

To sell or to describe?

2007-03-23T19:02:00.000-06:00

In the last two decades, newspaper design has evolved dramatically, from dummy sheets pasted up in the composing room to today’s sleek, elaborate pages designed with the help of computer programs. Technology has given designers more flexibility and creativity in their designs. Today, many designers have developed a keen eye for visual storytelling, designing layouts that improve a reader’s understanding of the story.

But changes in newspaper design have had both positive and negative effects on the product. Anne Van Wagener of the Poynter Institute explains that good design doesn’t always equal good, valuable news. “Newspapers became more aesthetically pleasing,” she says, “but often at the cost of accuracy of the report and the credibility of the visual journalist.” (1)

Now that newspapers are focusing more and more on selling the paper, the designer’s role is changing. Design has traditionally focused on telling the story visually, on making information accessible and easy to read and on giving readers as much information and news as possible in a short time and in limited space. But with an emphasis on getting readers to pick up the paper, more and more designers are facing pressures to excite and dramatize the news through cool, sexy, powerful layouts. Although this approach produces some amazing, impressive design work, it also has the potential to create a false sense of drama and mislead readers about the tone and content of a story. The new Weekend Missourian provides a perfect example of the debate over the role of design in “selling” a story.

The first Weekend Missourian edition, published March 3, was a collaborative effort involving nearly everyone in the Missourian newsroom. It was especially important that the first cover story, about a new plan for redeveloping downtown Columbia, be designed to catch readers and draw them in to this new publication. Our managing editor said the first cover needed to have “energy, motion, movement, excitement” for our readers. Instead of trying to tell the story on the cover, he said, we needed to focus more on what would get readers to pick the paper up off their driveway and actually read it. Thus, “sell, don’t describe” became our mantra for the Weekend Missourian. The first edition used a full-page photograph of downtown Columbia at night on the cover, which embodied the “energy, motion, movement, excitement” that the paper was aiming for.

Unfortunately, the cover story was about city planning and was, through no fault of the reporter, pretty bland and static. The story inside contained none of the “energy” or “excitement” that the cover design seemed to promise. To some, it may have seemed misleading.

Journalists talk a lot about accuracy, and design is as much a part of accurately representing a story as is the reporting and editing. When we give a story more drama or attention than it deserves, designers run the risk of damaging accuracy and leading readers to believe the story is something it’s not. What may seem overdramatic to one person may seem appropriate to another, making it difficult to judge what sort of presentation best serves the reader.

It is impossible for any designer today to ignore the expectation that design will both convey information visually and entice readers to read the paper. However, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Jan White, author of Editing by Design, explains that designers must combine the two seemingly incompatible ideas of product-making and storytelling.(2) In the end, a successful design strikes a balance between the two, communicating specific messages to an audience within the context of the newspaper as a product for sale. The challenge for designers, therefore, is to balance the need to sell the story with the need to convey information accurately and appropriately. Good design, created with a thoughtful analysis of the story and a consideration of the needs of both the newspaper and its readers, can accomplish both these tasks.

(1) Van Wagener, Anne. “Looking good and getting it right: SND develops an ethics code.” Poynter Online. . 24 February 2006.
(2) White, Jan V. Editing by Design. New York: Allworth Press, 2003. pp. 2.

The thrill of power

2007-03-23T17:57:00.000-06:00

It is said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That sentiment has been proven historically accurate by many dictators, politicians and executives. It also rings true in the case of sportswriters voting for national awards.

In baseball, many national awards, such as American League and National League MVP, are voted on by sportswriters. Placement in the top 10 of the voting for many awards is used in contract negotiations and the basis for monetary incentives to be written into players’ contracts. So, clearly, they are not just popularity contests that should be taken lightly – they can have a monetary effect on a player and his career.

I see problems with this system. Many sportswriters, at least a lot of the ones I have encountered, are sports fans. They have favorite teams and favorite players just like the general public. This can lead to bias in the voting. In addition, beat writers can be so focused on the team they are covering that they do not have an adequate general knowledge of the league’s other players. Yes, they man know who is leading the league in certain statistics, and they may have seen each player play a couple of games in a season, but that should not be the basis for such important awards.

Beat writers, at least one who is satisfied with their jobs, tend to have a bias toward the team that they cover. This can also lead to skewed voting. They may see a player on that team play 162 games and believe that they truly are the best player in the league or the best player at their position, leading them to cast their vote for that player. Alternatively, they may just like a player on their team better than a player on another team who actually deserves a vote.

Chicago Sun-Times White Sox beat writer Joe Cowley cast an interesting MVP ballot this past season. In one of the closest MVP races in years, Justin Morneau of the Minnesota Twins edged Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees. Cowley placed Jeter fifth on his ballot, the lowest of any voter, and included White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski in his top ten. Did he do it because he is good friends with A.J. and they like to joke around – probably. Many similar voting mishaps have occurred, but the system has not been altered.

There are probably many solutions to this problem, but I have two that I believe would work well. First, you could have only national baseball writers vote for the awards. This way they would not have an allegiance to just one team. Also, because of the extensive travel they do, they get a chance to see different teams play several games over the course of the season. While this would make for an extremely small voting pool, the voters would be very educated. Alternatively, the managers and/or players could vote for the awards. Some say that this could turn into a popularity contest, but the same argument could be made against the current system. The players have seen each other in action and are probably the most qualified to judge skill. It is one of the jobs of a manager to know what players out there are the best – so this would just be using their knowledge for a good cause.

A half-hearted argument for licensing journalists

2007-03-23T17:34:00.000-06:00

One of the charms of print journalism -- historically, at least -- is the perception that anybody can do it. Many famous journalists never actually studied it formally, and the story about the kid who starts out working the press and eventually breaks the big story never gets old. Of course, these sentimentalities should have little or nothing to do with the argument as to whether journalists should be licensed.
There are a few reasons I can think of why we shouldn't license journalists. One, there really isn't a point. Is there an epidemic of poor journalism going around in America right now? Even if there were, what kind of test or licensing would really fix it? Would Jason Blair not have been able to pass a basic current events/ethics test? I think there's no doubt he would have. Not to knock down the profession a knotch, but how can we really compare journalism to medicine, law or even plumbing? There really are very few basic requirements. Those include telling the truth and attempting to be fair. That's basically it.
We can talk about our role as gatekeepers, as watchdogs of the government, as forums of democracy, but none of those are really requirements to be considered a journalist. Otherwise sportswriters, fashion editors and designers would be out of luck.
The second and more pressing reason not to license journalists is the angry confused public reaction that would undoubtedly follow, not to mention the level of acidic debate it would necessitate within the journalism community. Journalists, already unpopular figures according to all the latest polls, would be further villified by bloggers, who, even if included as possible licensees, would overwhelmingly disapprove of any attempt to further centralize the media. Licensing would be met with skepticism, doubt and conspiracy theories -- none of which would probably be worth treading through.
But there is legitimate reason for licensing journalists, and that's to legitimize shield laws. As we all know, journalists go to jail occasionally for refusing to reveal their sources in the face of judicial subpoenas. The most recent examples have been Judith Miller, who outed Valerie Plame, and the two San Francisco Chronicle reporters who investigated Barry Bonds and baseball's steroids scandal.
The problem isn't quite as widespread as you might think from the amount of coverage these jailings tend to generate, but it does exist, and it is a concern, especially for those of us who plan to enter the profession. There should be no ethical dillema between informing the public and keeping a source hidden. The two should be parallel goals, not exclusive.
Further, I personally don't believe licensing is necessary for Congress to pass a federal shield law. I think bloggers, writers, tv reporters, columnists and whistleblowers should all be protected -- with limitations -- from being forced to reveal sources in the face of jail time, whether they possess some sort of license or not. But licensing might not be a bad idea to help facilitate the whole thing. By licensing, I don't mean that we should force anybody who practices journalism to take a test, I just think that for anybody who wishes to be under the protection of shield laws, it might be a good idea, if only to get some swing voters firmly on the side of shield laws.

journalism licensing across world

2007-03-23T16:00:00.000-06:00

In 2005, the White House admitted the first blogger to the White House press corps. It was a revolutionary step in acknowledging a new field of journalism and granting authority to a new type of journalist. However, the blogger admitted to the press corps previously worked closely with John McCain on his political campaigns. This fact was not reported by many large news agencies, including the New York Times.

The position of White House correspondent is a coveted among many journalists. Journalists chosen for this beat and granted White House credentials are assumed by the public to be highly qualified and able to report without a bias. With such a vast arena of “journalists,” however, who is able to determine which are qualified for access to major sporting events, the White House and other restricted newsworthy forums and information outlets?

Among professional journalism organizations and politicians, there is debate concerning the possible licensing of journalists. In this matter, certain qualifications would be required for a journalist to receive a license and there would be penalties for unethical behavior (such as the suspension of a person’s license). This debate is not only being held in the United States, but in countries all over the globe. Licenses would help determine which journalists are credible and should be allowed in restricted events.

An op-ed piece published in The Statesman, the oldest newspaper in Ghana, argues in favor of licensing journalists due to a recent influx of unethical behavior and unprofessional practices in the field. In Ghana, there is a professional organization for journalism, recognized in the country’s constitution, which lists expectations for journalists and accepted practices. Journalists, however, are not living up to these expectations and the organization – the GJA – has no power to penalize journalists who do not abide by its standards. The op-ed piece argues that the GJA should license journalists who meet certain qualifications, and without this certification, a journalist cannot be employed. Furthermore, a journalist’s license may be suspended for unprofessional behavior.

Restricting journalism employment to only licensed journalists, however, would not be practical in the United States. There are too many modes for journalism, such as blogs, newspapers, magazine, television and radio, to restrict their employment methods. Underground news outlets would develop. This would also violate the First Amendment of the Constitution since it would, in effect, restrict freedom of the press.
In Venezuela, the Supreme Court ruled that licensing journalists is incompatible with the Western Hemisphere’s convention on human rights. This is in regard to Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights, which says that “everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression” and that the “exercise of that right shall not be subject to prior censorship” – a clause very similar to the U.S. First Amendment. Furthermore, licensing “would contain restrictions to freedom of expression that are not authorized” by the American Convention, and “would consequently be in violation not only of the right of each individual to seek and impart information and ideas through any means of his choice, but also the right of the public at large to receive information without any interference.”
There are, however, methods in which licensing could benefit the practice of journalism in the United States. Licensing could be a method for external agencies to easily determine who, out of a group of journalists, is credible and therefore qualified to report on an event. For instance, when the NCAA chooses journalists to be admitted to the NCAA basketball championship tournament, they do not have time to review the credentials of all applying journalists. Many times the NCAA and other agencies will choose based on name recognition. If journalists were licensed, then the NCAA would know a journalist is credible and not John Doe from Johnny’s Weekly Babbles Web site. This would allow for the NCAA to diversify by choosing journalists whose name they do not know, but can be confident it their credibility since he/she is licensed. Therefore licensing would be a method of weeding out unqualified journalists. But there is still the question of how to determine who receives a license?

Aside from basic writing and editing skills, determining the legitimacy of a journalist is subjective. Some of the best journalists do not have a formal education in the profession, therefore if education was used as a determining factor the profession could suffer. Secondly, if a test is used, what kind of questions would be presented? Even journalists who break or bend ethical boundaries usually know the right thing to do, they just choose to ignore it. Therefore their answers to ethical questions on a test could present the person as ethically sound and credible.
Since there is no plausible method for licensing journalists without restricting individuals that are qualified or making the licensing requirements so easy that anyone could receive them, it is not practical for the United States. There already exist journalism agencies that recognize credible news outlets, such as the Missouri Press Organization. Such organizations may be used to weed out who is credible and who is not without the complications that licensing of individual journalists stirs up. Therefore although licensing would have its benefits, it is not plausible for the United States based on our freedom of speech laws and the numerous outlets of information and journalists practicing in this country.

Want it?

2007-03-23T15:40:00.000-06:00

On Monday we discussed the journalist’s role in society. The question of the day: Why journalists deserve the privilege of disseminating information to others?

The answer: Because we’re the ones that want it.

Without a system of credentials, a Hippocratic Oath or some sort of omnipotent association watching over us, that’s the best answer I think anyone can come up with. And given the history of our profession (or occupation or plain-ol’ job), that answer is acceptable – even though no Walter Williams-fearing reporter would ever accept it from a source. Simplistically, the American free press, the First Amendment, was created just because our Founding Fathers wanted it there. Some even thought they needed it. Practically, that answer makes sense: If you’re willing to live on a salary that rivals poverty-level, work 60-70 hours a week, get regularly reamed out by sources, editors, readers… well, that all has to be worth something (right?). We’re granted this privilege because we choose to make the necessary sacrifices.

In the short run, the simplistic and practical reasons make sense.

In the long run, though, “wanting it” is no longer good enough. It has always been that anyone can want the privilege, but now times have changed so that anyone can disseminate information, true, false or opinionated. Which brings us back to the original question. Without anything besides a strong, idealistic desire to inform the public, why do journalists worthy of such a special right?

Unless the industry makes some sweeping changes, I’d say journalists aren’t deserving. Now it’s about wanting to be worthy, not just wanting the power, and it’s our task to make ourselves deserving again. And talk about a daunting task. The notion of a free press, an open forum for discourse, make regulation challenging. Can you create credentials when doing so would discriminatory? A college degree, for instance, requires a certain influx of money.

News councils seem to be a better option. If we wish to be watchdogs, it’s only fair that we be willing to be watched ourselves. That’s a main difference between bloggers and journalists anyway: Reporters have an editor looming over their shoulders, they can get fired or promoted for their work; bloggers are often their own boss. News council oversight would explicitly separate professional journalists, giving readers a reason to trust the news, a reason to award reporters the privilege of informing. From the reporter’s standpoint, news councils could provide more concrete methods for determining ethical decisions. It may also make mistakes more tolerable. From my own observation, reporters are often afraid to disclose mistakes or missteps (especially in the foggy areas of technology) because doing so usually means losing his or her job. News council assessments could come up with appropriate penances, rather than just firing the reporter because the readership is calling for his or her head.

That said, news councils still might not be the best answer. I’d say they’re a good start, though, and, more importantly, a necessary start. In such a tech-savvy world, this conversation is already old. If journalists want to be privileged, they have to prove they are worthy. And the only way to do that is by taking real action.

Public/Private Priority

2007-03-23T15:20:00.000-06:00

Journalists have two lives that are meant to be kept separate but are invariably intertwined.

They are observers of the public and members of the public itself.

They are keepers of the public interest and have self interest.

They are watchdogs that are watched.

So what is their main role? And how is that role upheld?

Some of journalists’ most important roles (serving a watchdog, informing and seeking the truth) are included in the larger concept of accountability. A journalist’s role is to keep public and private institutions accountable for their actions. But news media are usually private institutions that operate in the public interest.

News councils are intended to uphold journalists’ role as keepers of accountability.
These councils are accessible to the public, and even incorporate laypersons to hear complaints against the media. The accessibility of the councils is certainly positive for the media because courts are avoided. News councils enable complaints to be settled without legal involvement, which means no legal fees and no legal reparations – a benefit for citizens and the media.

Doesn’t the public already hold the media accountable for its actions? We run corrections, we avoid libel, we use direct quotes …. And if wrongdoing is done, there are consequences in place in accordance with the legal system. Why is the legal system not good enough? Are the decisions the courts make lacking in some way?
I don’t think so.

And the courts are arguably just as public as a news council would be. If anything, I think journalists take the courts more seriously than they would a news council. Harsher punishments are a good way to stave off libel.

A benefit of complaints filed through a news council and not the courts is accessibility. By involving laypersons and journalists in the decision-making process, complainants’ and journalists’ interests are well represented. The Minnesota News Council requires a waiver from complainants “agreeing to use the News Council, rather than the courts to resolve” their issues with the news organization.
But does working directly with the public to solve discrepancies help journalists’ credibility more than stepping around the court system could hurt accountability?
It seems that by instituting a news council, the media would be saying to the public: we need to be regulated more than the courts regulate us, and we need the public to hold us accountable for more than they already to. Is that the truth? Do the courts not work enough? Does the public feel so disconnected from the media that they feel stepped on by the same entity that is meant to help them?

The public needs to know that the media’s role is accountability – to them and to itself. Audiences should be able to tell from a medium’s news coverage that the media are accountable to them and are serving them. If audiences don’t see that, then they either aren’t being served correctly or the audiences’ opinion of the media has been warped by negative experiences or naiveté. Instead of instituting news councils, the media should start by evaluating their practices and how they are serving the public before they consider how they are serving themselves as a private business.

Can a council promoting fairness be fair itself?

2007-03-23T14:48:00.000-06:00

A news council's mission is to promote fairness, accuracy and balance within the media. More so, it's to encourage punishments for members of the media that don't abide by these journalistic guidelines.

But where the problem comes in is that the council is simply a collection of people, a collection consisting of former members of the media as well as the general public. Can this group of people really decide if another person has been fair and accurate in describing some event without the group having experienced the event itself? No person, or group of people, can truly be objective him or herself. So how is one person to decide if another has done its job objectively?

Debates last for hours deciding which TV stations or newspapers are more balanced and accurate than others. Yet by implementing a council, we would be suggesting that objectivity (or lack thereof) is fact. It's far from it. Without going through a reporter's notes, I can't assume whom that reporter talked to, which opinions that reporter included/excluded. I can't assume how accurate his or her story is comparison to the events that actually took place without having been there myself.

It's something I mentioned in class, but I think it serves as the best example. NBA All-Star weekend in Las Vegas last month brought back mixed reviews from sports columnists. Vegas was an important site for the NBA All-Star festivities, as the city is trying to get an NBA team some time in the future. It was crucial for the city to provide a positive outlook and prove it was worthy of an NBA franchise. Following the even, many columnists wrote about how great the city was and what a great time they had visiting it.

But Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock, writing for AOL sports for this particular issue, took another angle (http://sports.aol.com/whitlock/_a/mayhem-main-event-at-nba-all-star/20070220103009990001). He focused on the "mayhem" of the weekend in Vegas, pointing out the high number of crimes that took place. Included are events of gang violence, fights, robberies, a shooting and of course, the Pacman Jones incident at a local strip club. Whitlock, for describing what he calls a "unmitigated failure," gets chastised by his fellow sports columnists.

Columbia Journalism Review writer Dan Goldberg was very critical of Whitlock's column, as was ESPN Page 2 writer Scoop Jackson (who Whitlock has been critical of in the past). While Jackson's article, "What really happened in Vegas?" (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=jackson/070228) does not mention Whitlock by name, it is a direct refute of his column for AOL Sports. Blogs across the country also bashed Whitlock for putting All-Star weekend in a bad light. Very few defended Whitlock, until Bill Simmons, who like Jackson is a writer for ESPN Page 2, did so in a Vegas follow-up (http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/page2/blog/entry?id=2784283&searchName=simmons&action=login&appRedirect=http%3a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fespn%2fpage2%2fblog%2fentry%3fid%3d2784283%26searchName%3dsimmons).

I can't help but wonder how the news council would view this situation. With most people speaking out against Whitlock's analysis of the events of NBA All-Star weekend, it would seem as if he was in the wrong, as if most of the information was inaccurate, unfair or unbalanced. CJR's criticism focuses more on Whitlock's lack of sourcing (despite the fact he was in Vegas to actually witness the event himself). By the news council's definition of its mission, Whitlock would deserve some sort of punishment. In a round-about way, Jackson goes as far as to claim that Whitlock's accounts are unbalanced and biased, saying the issue is about race and little else.

Judging by other sports columnists’ reactions (as well as many blogs), it would seem as if Whitlock’s views of the event were in the minority. Sure, one has to allow for the possibility that his information and account might have in fact been misleading.

But at the same time, you must allow for the possibility that Whitlock was the one writer who had the guts to tell what really happened over the weekend. He didn’t follow suit and talk about
how great Vegas was for the sake of promoting the NBA. And what if his version of the event was the most accurate? I have a hard time believing that a news council would believe his version over all else with other writers claiming his article was biased and inaccurate (exactly what the council would be trying to get rid of). In this case, they would encourage punishment for Whitlock. And punishing the writer who had the guts to speak up isn’t what journalism is about.

I’m afraid that by establishing a news council and maybe even allowing it the power to punish writers, we would be discouraging them from having an opinion that may be in the minority or one that may shed an unfavorable light on an otherwise positive event. And if we set the standards for journalism as "going with the majority," we have discredited the profession. We will have taken the watchdog role out of journalism.

Sports writers should continue to vote

2007-03-23T12:30:00.000-06:00

The primary role of journalists is to act as news informers. They are responsible for communicating to citizens what is important and what they should be aware of. However, sometimes journalists can cross the line from news informer to news maker. Sports writers are one group that often becomes victims of this transformation. Sports writers often become news makers when they are obliged to vote on certain postseason awards such as the league’s Most Valuable Player award. A prime example is during last season’s American League MVP voting when Chicago Sun-Times sports writer Joe Cowley voted Derek Jeter sixth on his ballot – lower than any other voter. As a result, Cowley made national news for his bizarre ballot and received about 500 e-mails from angry Yankee fans – many of which were personal attacks such as, “hope your cancer comes back” and “hope you have a short life.” It is exactly this type of situation which has some newspapers now forbidding their sports writers from voting on such awards. However, I don’t believe this is the right move by those newspapers.

The argument by some newspapers is that they don’t want to put their sports writers in the position that Cowley found himself in. They don’t believe a reporter should be a household name because of his vote. "Voting on awards like this puts reporters in the position of making the news, and that's not our job," said Tom Jolly, sports editor of The New York Times. "Our job is to report on the news, not to make it." I agree with that statement to a point, however, people need to remember that Cowley was the exception, not the norm. Most sports writers do vote in an objective manner. The only reporters who become household names because of their vote are the ones who show such clear and unfair bias like Cowley did. Obviously, there’s always going to be a little bias for anyone, even journalists. If you’re covering a team day in and day out for months at a time, you’re bound to be more knowledgeable about someone and likely think more favorably of them if you’re following them all the time. The key for journalists to be aware of that inherent bias and to make sure you’re voting honestly and for the right reasons.

Many players have contracts that pay a bonus for MVP awards and other honors. When a sports writer's vote can have a direct impact on the salary of a player who is also a news source, that creates a conflict of interest that is unmatched in any other area of journalism. I understand the argument, but I think there’s a stronger one the other way.

If sports writers should not vote because it’s a conflict of interest, then who should? Fans? Obviously, that’s completely out of the question. Fans are more biased than anyone. Most of the fans who vote for the All-Star starters don’t care what their stats are or who actually deserves a spot. For example, in last season’s American League All-Star voting, Detroit Tigers catcher Ivan Rodriguez and his decent season (.308 – 7 HRs – 39 RBIs) was named the starter over Minnesota Twins catcher Joe Mauer, who was leading the majors with a .378 batting average. It doesn’t make much sense but it happens time and time again. Fans voting on the All-Star starters are one thing, but postseason awards are another story. Clearly, the managers and players voting is a better idea than the fans, but I still don’t believe they would be any more objective and less biased than sports writers. One thing people forget is that managers and coaches already do get to vote on one postseason award: The Gold Glove award. Managers and coaches cannot vote for anyone on their own team, but this still produces some strange results. In last season’s Gold Glove award for AL second basemen, the Royals’ Mark Grudzielanek won despite the A’s Mark Ellis setting the all-time fielding percentage record for a second baseman. If managers are so qualified to vote for postseason awards, they surely haven’t showed it with the Gold Glove award voting. If players voted, it’s hard to imagine any situation where a team with a player contending for an award, would vote for anyone but the guy on his team. Players and managers have just as much if not more of a conflict of interest when it comes to bonuses being handed out for winning awards. They are most likely going to want to see their friend and teammate take home that extra million bucks more than a journalist would. Having someone else vote would eliminate the problem for writers, but that would just cause more problems than are actually being fixed.

Postseason honors are staples of their sports. These honors are a big criterion for the Hall of Fame and they often define the players’ careers. They are an irreplaceable part of sports. To have un-qualified people voting diminishes the sport. That is bigger than something such as the appearance of a conflict of interest. Sports writers are the most qualified to vote because they are most knowledgeable and they are aware at least of their biases because they’re trained to be. There is no perfect system out there. Someone is always going to be unhappy no matter who votes or who wins. However, the one that works best is when the most qualified people vote: The journalists.

Knowing where to draw the line (theoretically and literally)

2007-03-23T11:28:00.000-06:00

Reporters have the responsibility of gathering information, holding public officials accountable and then writing it up for their audience. Editors have the responsibility of making sure the story is easy to understand, holding the reporter accountable with fact checking and then producing the most accurate story to be published. Designers have the responsibility of making a layout accessible and easy to navigate, making the design interesting enough that a reader will want to learn more and representing the story through the design in the correct tone and way. But the last two responsibilities of designers aren’t always regarded in the same terms.

Designers are journalists in their own right – they help to tell a story through typography, photos or illustrations, break out boxes and other extra elements within a page design. Although journalists are taught to tell a story to it’s complete accuracy and truthfulness, these rules or guidelines seem to get altered in small ways sometimes in regards to design. The problem is that newspapers are a business, too. They have to think about what sells the paper and how to get people to read the publication. Although content is a driving factor in whether people decide to read a story, most of the time how the page looks is going to be the first reason someone picks up the newspaper.

So as a designer, you know a lot rests on your shoulders in regards to selling the product. But how do you incorporate the ideals you’ve learned as a journalist into making something “look good” as well? Sometimes stories aren’t as engaging as you were anticipating and then you’re stuck with whether to make your design reflect the story or dress the story up with your design. Often the feedback is to make the page as exciting as possible, but that could mean you’re being inaccurate with the story.

A design editor at Poynter Institute defines bad design as getting “in the way of the information instead of enhancing it.” Knowing where to draw the line theoretically between selling and telling is a very important part of being a good designer – but knowing where to draw the line literally to make an intelligent and enticing design is also important. Too often the news agenda is not set by what story is most important for the public to know, but is set by what the editors think should be played big because it’s a local story or because it’s not a dry, complicated topic.

While the Columbia Missourian doesn’t provide the exact setting of a real news room, designers do have the opportunity to make the decision – with a little help from others – on what story should be played as a lead on the front page. Those decisions should be based on the content of the story and whether it has valuable information. But newspapers – in the face of declining circulations – have shifted their focus to what might be more visually appealing or how to visually pump up a story even if that means the design is misrepresentative.

Although designers should try and come up with creative ways to visually tell a story and draw readers in, they should not give up their standards or previous teachings on how to be truthful, objective and descriptive.

My encounters with ethics

2007-03-23T08:53:00.000-06:00

One way ethics has impacted my job as a journalist has been conflict of interest. My first encounter with this problem was between publications. I started working at the Maneater my freshmen year, but in 2005, The Missourian hired me for the summer to do the sports scores page. At the time, I was aware of this as a conflict of interest and informed my employers. The sports editor said it would be fine to return to The Maneater in the fall as long as I didn’t have any affiliation with the Maneater over the summer.

My second encounter with the “act independently” part of the Code of Ethics had to do with sports itself. It has always been a rule at the sports desk that no one is to wear any sort of Mizzou apparel. (I have gotten around this by wearing a scarf over my fleece with a tiger logo on it.) While I agree with this rule, it is the unspoken rule that my sports editor enforces which is: No sports logos of any kind should be worn on the sports desk. He says that this is not a hard and fast rule, but we are all striving to be professional, and you can’t be professional if you are a fan.

Now, in no way am I a fan of any sort for any sport. Let me put it this way, I have to ask others the names of sports teams and what cities they are from. In other words, I have very little knowledge of sports, let alone have any sort of admiration for any particular team. However, there are others on the desk who do have their favorite teams.

I have several opinions on this subject. On one side, I think my editor is right about not showing any bias toward a team. When a reporter is covering a team, he should not be wearing a Texas Longhorns hat to report on the Tigers. My editor provided some words of wisdom. He said it’s one thing to have a passion for something at heart, it’s another thing to broadcast it. In other words, you can like the Dallas Cowboys, but in the newsroom and on the field, you should appear to be an objective journalist.

On the other side, I think that as a designer, if I want to wear my Mizzou polo to work, I should be allowed to. Here are my reasons: 1) By wearing the shirt, I am showing support for the school of which I attend, not the sports teams. 2) I am never courtside covering a team for the Missourian. My job involves coming into the newsroom and putting words and photos on to the pages. But in the name of objectivity, I have refrained from wearing any visible Mizzou apparel.

So whether it is deciding how to play a story on 1A or setting aside my Mizzou jacket, journalism ethics do play a role in my work as a designer. I am the last person to make decisions about my pages before they are sent to the press, I am have to be completely accountable for everything I do. Even though my job doesn’t really entail a lot of content related issues, my job does have impact on what readers focus on and how they are drawn into the story, so I feel like I am contributing to the greater good. The integrity of the publication and my role as a journalist is important.

Providing an Extra Check

2007-03-22T22:55:00.000-06:00

I have always been a firm believer that democracy cannot exist without a free press. During a communications class my junior year the professor asked for all the journalism majors in the room to raise their hands. I quickly scanned the room hoping for tons of hands to shoot up, and not one budged. I knew I was in trouble as I timidly raised my hand. He had me come to the front of the class and then asked the class: “Who here believes that a free press is a fundamental element to democracy?” Out of a class of about thirty maybe five raised their hand. The professor then looked at me, and said it was my job to convince the class that my “future occupation was more important than theirs.”

The discussion was a little awkward at first as I tried to navigate through my explanation without hurting anyone feelings and sounding too egotistical. But by the end of the class I had close to three-fourths of the class now believing a true democracy must contain a free press. Journalists have a responsibility to watch over the government, businesses and organizations on all levels and make sure proper procedures and actions are being executed. I am excited about this role of a watchdog, acting as another “check” in the checks and balances system.

It’s hard to concretely define the role of a journalist when the definition of a journalist is constantly debated. There are no standardized tests or required curriculum to pass to be labeled as a journalist. A 2002 study conducted by journalist and author Hugo de Burgh found that the primary reason people become journalists is a love for writing. The enjoyment of reporting and interviewing was the second most popular reason. The third and fourth most common reason cited was a desire to be involved in public events and an interest in politics. I was surprised that “being a watchdog,” or “lending a voice to the overshadowed” didn’t even break the top ten.

I can not tell you how often I have walked into a legislative meeting and had a group of men in their fancy suites stop discussing their plans because a reporter was now in the room. We hold a lot of power. We hold a lot more power than we realize. But just like Spiderman, “with this power, comes great responsibility.” Journalists set the agenda and tell readers what to be discussing at dinner parties and what to be outraged over. By what we cover and how we cover it, we decide what’s important for society to be thinking about. In my opinion, “news” has become too entertainment oriented and we need provide better news coverage.

I like to believe that leaders and people in high positions have made a decision not to do something bad or unlawful because of what would happened if the press found out. People tend to make more ethical decisions if they know someone is watching. It is important for people to know they are going to be held accountable. If a fire kills 10 people in a facility that was not required to have a sprinkler system because lobbyists bought off lawmakers because it would cost a lot of money and time to install sprinklers, the public deserves to know this information.

Journalists also act as information filters for society. It is very easy for people to go online and find out information on their own, that they don’t rely as much on journalists as in the past. However, journalists must continue to sift through information, and place the facts in context and explain to the reader what certain information or news means to them. Journalists have the obligation to analyze and provide context and meaning to current events to make people understand the importance or impact of an event. It is one thing to know that something happened, it is quite another to understand the significance of the event, what led up to it, and potential consequences. Journalists need to continue to perform this analytical role to create a more informed society. It is important that society is informed so it can fully and knowledgeably participate in the democratic process.

A Reason to Read

2007-03-22T20:45:00.000-06:00

As journalists, we dictate what topics are on the minds and lips of our readers. We plastered our radios, Web sites and news sections of papers with word on Anna Nicole Smith’s death. Watergate caused people to be acutely aware of political scandal. We gave credence to the threat of a possible influenza pandemic, and we also discussed performance-enhancing drug use within our athletes.

There is a fine balance to find between giving people what they want vs. giving people what they need. Much of the news Americans ingest comes in the form of infotainment, at the loss of critical context and information on other more serious, life-changing topics. We as journalists give them that information because that is what the public wants; that is what sells our newspapers, magazines and commercial spots.

On Wednesday, ESPN.com highlighted NCAA women’s basketball when the second round of the Tournament was completed. Maryland, the defending national champion, was eliminated. That was news. But unless there is a scandal, or Oklahoma’s Courtney Paris breaks her leg, women’s basketball, or women’s sports in general, will not see the same press exposure as men’s sports.

I never saw myself as a champion for women’s sports and certainly not women’s basketball. I was in love with boy’s basketball. I didn’t even like girl’s basketball, and I played it growing up. But then I had a chance to cover the sport, and I saw things that made me change my mind and become increasingly more passionate about a game I already loved, only this time, played by females.

I can understand how people would not respect women’s sports. But that doesn’t mean I agree with that fact or have to allow others to complacently continue in their thinking.

A journalist’s job is to give people enough information to make informed choices. Our stories should reflect not only what people are talking about, but also what they should be talking about. By holding on to the status quo of promoting male sports over female sports, we are hurting no one but those that come after us.

I could go into all of the injustices done against women in history, but I won’t. We haven’t even had a hundred years of voting to our names yet. Every time journalists place women’s basketball at the bottom of an inside page, we uphold the historical barriers that have been placed on women as the weaker sex. And it’s not just basketball, it’s all women’s sports.

Then you have low-revenue sports. Lacrosse. Rugby. Gymnastics. They aren’t considered the norm for American sports, so how can they deserve space on page one? The sports aren’t riddled with high-profile athletes or deep-pocketed sponsors. Again, we perpetuate stereotypes and prevent these sports from possibly becoming high-profile because of our media coverage decisions.

In the 1970s, NASCAR founder Bill France wanted more media coverage for his races and for the sport. Autosports were a hard sell to traditional fans of stick-and-ball sports. But as the sport began to grow in fan base, television networks responded by broadcasting portions of races, and maybe a few highlights on newscasts. But in 1979, France and CBS reached an agreement to broadcast the entire Daytona 500. The race garnered one of the highest ratings in television history when the former lap leaders got into a brawl on the front straightaway after crashing into one another. That fight was watched by millions and then stuck on the front pages of newspapers across the country.

And look at NASCAR now.

People really do read into what we write and how we write it. It especially makes a difference where we place it on a page. What does this mean for our objectivity? Just because we place high school girls tennis as a sports centerpiece, doesn’t mean we like that sport more than another. It simply tells our readers that we feel it is worthy of a first-glance. We can’t make people read stories about teams they don’t want to read about. But if a subscriber finds the WNBA’s New York Liberty front and center, time and again, it might give that reader a reason to read. And that’s what my job is all about.

Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

2007-03-22T18:04:00.000-06:00

As journalists, we have a very important role, which is to set the news agenda for the public. In other words, we’re an informer.

As an informer, we’re expected to provide the news of the day to our audiences. We’re supposed to investigate and be a watchdog. But we also need to give a voice to the voiceless.

We are required to expose the injustices of society- whether they occur in our backyards or halfway across the world. But in the fast-paced world we live in, how do we make time to expose the injustices halfway across the world? How do we convince our new outlets that it serves a highly important cause? How do we find room in the budget to research and report these stories? But most of all- how do we get our audiences to care about the injustices halfway across the world?

Most people living in the U.S. don’t care about things happening outside of their community, not to mention outside of their country or continent. But I think that’s where we- the journalists- come in. We are supposed to make them care. We are expected to find a way to make them care. Because after all, it’s for the good of humanity.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has devoted his time and work to exposing the atrocities in Darfur. He brought the Darfur genocide to the forefront of media attention and governmental pressure. Nichols Kristof began writing about the violence in Darfur in 2003 when almost no other media, non-governmental organization, or governmental agency spoke the word Darfur, let alone genocide. He described the Janjaweed’s tactics of destroying Darfur villages. The Janjaweed’s main strategy was to ensure that the village would be forever uninhabitable so they poisoned wells by stuffing them with corpses of people and donkeys.

Kristof also has heavily criticized Bush and Kofi Annan’s efforts in the Darfur genocide.
I hate to say it, but the way things are going, when he dies his obituary will begin: “Kofi Annan, the former U.N.
secretary general who at various points in his career presided ineffectually over the failure to stop genocide, first in
Rwanda and then in Sudan, died today.”
Kristof also suggests the U.S. should stop the Sudan government from using its aircraft to terrorize civilians by imposing a no-fly zone, force economic sanctions on Sudan’s leaders, and push for an expanded security force in Darfur.

And Kristof has even ridiculed his own profession, the media, for not giving Darfur the coverage it needs. According to monitoring by the Tyndall Report, ABC News had a total of 18 minutes of the Darfur genocide in its nightly news in 2004, NBC News had only 5 minutes and CBS only 3, which is about a minute of coverage for every 300,000 deaths. In contrast, Martha Stewart received 130 minutes of coverage by the three networks. In 2005, ABC had 11 minutes about Darfur, NBC had 5, and CBS only had 2. In contrast, the networks gave the Michael Jackson trial in 2005 a total of 84 minutes of coverage.

The media plays a significant role in agenda setting for the public. Thus, if the media gives more priority to the sex, cheating, and drugs associated with movie stars than Darfur, the public is never going to be convinced that Darfur is something worth caring about. Nicholas Kristof has made a commitment to informing the American public of the Darfur genocide in hopes that someone- anyone will stand up and try to do something before it’s too late.

Nicholas Kristof, “Dare We Call It Genocide?” The New York Times, (June 16, 2004)
Nicholos Kristof, “Reign of Terror”, The New York Times, (September 11, 2004)
Nichols Kristof, “All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes on Brad Pitt”, The New York Times, (July 26, 2005).
Nicholos Kristof, “Helping Bill O’Reilly”, The New York Times, (February 7, 2006)

A minority stance

2007-03-22T17:13:00.000-06:00

I believe that a journalist’s credibility is the most important attribute for us to protect. If we don’t work to ensure our work is credible to the public, to the highest degree possible, the news industry is worthless and will eventually die.

The message on the blackboard on Wednesday read, “We are the arms dealers in the war of words.” When the trust to be the public’s voice is questioned or distrusted, we will have lost the war.

The widely held belief that “anyone can be a journalist,” only belittles the credibility that those of us with extensive news training have earned. In this sense, I am for requiring journalists to be licensed and/or credentialed. We should be held to higher standard than CNN I-Report or the millions of bloggers.

I don’t mean to say that there aren’t quality journalists out there who aren’t journalism school trained. Peter Jennings didn’t even graduate high school and he was one of the most trusted newscasters of our time. But, when a profession is based on credibility I want to be able to show the public how much I have put into being a trusted voice. And if that means being held accountable to a “News Council” when journalism codes are broken, I’m still for it. We scrutinize other professions’ job performance, why are we any different?

Doctors, lawyers, and even teachers need to be certified and that is why their expertise is rarely if at all questioned. I want to have the best doctor operate on me just like I want to trust the journalist who covers the White House. People like Jason Leopold, Jason Blair, and other unethical journalists make up just a tiny percentage of journalists, but their reputations create a cloud that covers the rest of us. Credentialing and de-credentialing journalists will help put up a much needed wall between those to be trusted and those that don’t deserve that respect.

We are granted an unbelievable privilege in this country. Journalists are the gatekeepers of the public interest, we create knowledgeable citizens; we analyze institutions, and hold those in power accountable.

I’m not a big fan of clichés, but one seems to work here: “To whom much is given, much shall be expected.”

Professor Steffens asked if journalists are more equal to others. In the sense of the responsibility we are granted, the access we need and enjoy and the forums we use to disseminate news, frankly, we are more equal. We should be held to lofty standards.

Journalists are also chosen to award our society’s highest honors in entertainment, athletic achievement, and journalistic success amongst other prestigious awards. Only those that are trained in the science of objectivity should be allowed to make these decisions that can make or break a career or even determine who can earn incredible amounts of money. And when the MVP of the National League or the Academy Award is being announced, I want the San Francisco Chronicle’s baseball beat writer and the Los Angeles Times’ movie critic to have voted, not the basement blogger on MLB Gamecast or voters on imdb.com.

Whether it be a 3x5 card that fits in my wallet, a diploma that I can frame for my office wall or just a passing grade on a credential exam, I want it, and I think the industry would be better off.

Regaining the public trust

2007-03-22T08:40:00.000-06:00

It’s no real news that public trust in the media is declining. That’s a notion that has been around since the mid-1950s. It’s also something that constantly confronts journalists – just last weekend, the Missourian received countless e-mails about a “Belief in Brief” article on L. Ron Hubbard and scientology, with the stereotypical complaint that journalists often mischaracterize information or report on their own conceptions. This response was to a section of the article concerning the controversy revolving scientology and Hubbard.

Members of the media have a hard time at combating this image. We consider ourselves to be professional, but we have no license, testing or competency requirements, other than requirements set by our employers. I don’t believe we need to be licensed – fear of losing one’s license may keep reporters from uncovering the truth. However, journalists do need to have a check on their power – a sort of watchdog for the watchdog.

Enter news councils. In the industry, news councils are defined as “independent, independent, nonprofit organizations that promote trusted journalism by investigating accuracy and fairness complaints against news outlets.” It is the role of a news council to determine facts involved in the dispute and provide forums for the citizens and journalists to discuss media ethics, standards and performance. (http://www.knightfdn.org/default.asp?story=news_at_knight/releases/2006/2006_06_28_newscouncils.html)

The Minnesota News Council was formed in 1970 when the Minnesota Newspaper Association realized this declining trust in the media. (www.news-council.org) It was set up to have 24 voting members – 12 journalists and 12 mainstream – plus a sitting justice of the state Supreme Court who would serve as chairperson at hearings to determine if there was any wrongdoing on the journalists’ part and whether he or she should be sanctioned for their writing. There is an area on the Web site to fill out a complaint about state and national newspapers and news stations, and the site states that most complaints do not involve a public hearing. According to the site:

Since 1971 the Minnesota News Council has received more than 1,680 complaints, 142 of which were adjudicated through our hearing process. Of these grievances, about half have been upheld and half have been rejected.

However, the industry isn’t openly embracing news councils. The one in Minnesota is one of only a handful. However, they are being encouraged. In July 2006, the Minnesota and Washington News Councils announced that Southern California and New England had won a national competition to create news councils. (www.knightfdn.org)
News councils aren’t necessary – that’s something Gary Gilson, director of the Minnesota News Council, wrote in a 2004 article. (http://news-council.org/archives/04gg.html) However, he writes that it is a good thing to help build public trust. In light of fabrications and failed attributions such as Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg, news councils help restore some of that trust, though.

All in all, I think news councils are a good idea in theory. It gets the public involved in journalism by showing them they do have a voice if they believe they have been wronged and teaches them more about the processes, standards and ethics of the profession. The public sanction that could occur definitely keeps journalists and their employers in check. However, it seems that news councils bring about quite a few slippery slopes. How do you determine who is a journalist? We’ve had several conversations in class over whether bloggers should qualify. Will a sanction actually hurt them? And if they aren’t considered a journalist, their case shouldn’t even have standing in the news council.

Will news councils be a part of the future of journalism? I think they will remain, but play a small role. For the most part, news organizations will listen to reader complaints and get to the bottom of the problem. And we’ve seen in cases such as that with Jayson Blair and The New York Times that the newspapers work to be transparent and right the wrong. News councils can play a role in winning the public trust. But I think newspapers and organizations can do the same thing.

To Vote or Not to Vote

2007-03-21T23:00:00.000-06:00

Journalists should be covering news, not making it. However, the minute the sports writer casts his vote for an end of the season award, a pre-season poll or any other ranking, he is directly affecting the outcome of it. He is affecting the very news that he will cover in the upcoming days.

Numerous newspapers, including the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times have already banned their sports reporters from casting votes for certain awards and/or polls. I argue that other publications need to follow suit.

The arguments on the other side are somewhat convincing. We’ll use baseball as an example here. Many argue that the beat writers who cover teams day in and day are the experts. They are the ones who have seen the players across the course of the season and have a great vantage point in which to compare talent. They know the statistics inside and out. Therefore, the argument is that there is no one more qualified than these “experts” to cast votes.

But is there a point in which this beat writer may lose his objectivity? Is he truly an expert on the sport, or does his allegiances lie with the team he covers? These are beat writers who, from the beginning of Spring Training until the end of pennant races and playoff games, spend a significant part of their time with the players and coaches of these teams. Therefore, is it possible for them to put aside these relationships and possibly friendships to cast an objective, non-biased vote for post-season honors? I am not convinced that it is all that easy to do so.

It is an honor to be among a select group of journalists to have the power to vote for postseason awards and rankings. But with that power comes the proclivity to abuse it. That power may be abused to feed the ego of the sports writer, or the integrity of the votes may be compromised to feed the needs and desires of specific teams and/or players. When a sportswriter casts his vote for a postseason award, he is essentially casting a vote with a multi-million dollar affect. Players have clauses in their contracts for bonuses contingent on postseason awards. Not to mention, winning an MVP Award, for example, will likely lead to more endorsements and an increase in public appearances. The bottom line: votes equal money. And when this money belongs to the player you have a strong relationship with or the team that you cover, objectivity may be compromised. There is a conflict of interest too strong to ignore.

On the other side of the coin, because the voting system is set up to make each voters’ votes public, sports writers may face criticism for their votes even if those votes have been made in an objective and honest manner. Fans - who are likely readers and a source of the newspaper’s profit – may object if the hometown writer doesn’t vote for the hometown player. Furthermore, if a player or a manager believe that he or the team should have received a high vote than you gave him, they have the power to diminish your access and the amount of information that they are willing to give you. There are too many toes that can be stepped on and too many parties with a vested interest in the votes for writers to have to jeopardize their ability to cover a team simply to exert the power to vote.

When I worked as an associate reporter for the Atlanta Braves with MLB.com last summer, I dealt with a great group of players. Well, all but one: Jorge Sosa. To put it honestly, Sosa was a pain to deal with. It never ceased to amaze me how he could speak English after a solid pitching outing, but had to silently disappear for a translator after blowing a save. He would usually never return. Members of the media dreaded having to try and waste their time trying to get information out of him, as Sosa was never willing to go out of his way for anyone in the media. Now Sosa was lucky to still be in the Majors midway through the season with the way he was allowing home runs leave the park. But imagine for a moment that he had been a star on the team. Imagine that he were, say, a star such as Barry Bonds or Albert Belle, one of those players who despised the media and who the media rolled their eyes at in return. When it comes time to vote for awards, does the media’s propensity to like certain players over others play a role in how votes are cast? As I ask myself that question, I am skeptical that it does. Going back to my example of Sosa, had he and pitcher John Smoltz been in contention for the same award and had comparable statistics, I wonder if I would be able to completely put aside my dislike for Sosa and my great relationship with Smoltz and vote objectively. I wonder if maybe the unparallel access that some use to justify the beat writers voting may actually be the source of an unjust bias.

If you take away the writers, then who should vote? I argue why not the baseball fraternity itself? Have current members of the Hall of Fame vote on new members. Who should be a better judge of talent than those who are among the game’s elite of all times. And as for postseason awards, I argue that managers should be the ones to cast the votes. Some will argue that managers have an even stronger alliance to a team than do writers; however, I don’t see this as getting in the way of their objectivity. You see coaches voting in NCAA football and basketball polls all the time. And if you were to compare these coaches polls with corresponding AP polls, you won’t find many discrepancies. If college coaches can put aside their allegiance and vote objectively when recruiting and postseason tournaments or games are at stake, then I argue, so can Major League Baseball managers.

In a 2005 column in which San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Tim Sullivan wrote about his decision to abstain from using his voting privileges, he brings up another risk writers now face. Because we are in the midst of a steroid era in which certain players and records are under scrutiny because of the possibility of performance enhancing drugs, a writer’s decision on whether or not to vote for Mark McGwire on the Hall of Fame ballot or for Barry Bonds on the MVP ballot is putting that writer in a position to make a judgment on whether or not McGwire, Bonds and others used performance-enhancing drugs. Sullivan writes: “Neither should I accept the responsibility of deciding whether Mark McGwire is still entitled to the presumption of innocence following his clumsy evasions before Congress…Better to recuse [sic] oneself than to render a judgment based on unsubstantiated suspicion. Better to stick to the sidelines than to get in a game in which you never really belonged.”

There are too many risks to credibility and too many traps set to eliminate objectivity for sports editors from newspapers to allow their writers to continue voting for awards. This may mean shaking an institution and a tradition that has been in place since the mid-20th century; however, in doing so, sports writers may gain much more than the power they may feel that they are losing. Randy Harvey, the sports editor of the Baltimore Sun, justified his decision to ban his writers from voting with this humorous, yet thought-provoking analogy: “You know, I wouldn't want baseball players voting on the Pulitzer Prize winners, so I'm not sure why we should be voting on baseball awards.”

Sources:
“Most Valuable Sayers” http://www.onthemedia.org /transcripts/2005/11/18/08
“Voting for baseball honors, ‘Ron Mexico’ test ethics of sports coverage.” http://talkingbaseball.wordpress.com/2005/12/20/voting-for-baseball-honors-ron-mexico-test-ethics-of-sports-coverage/

The journalist's silver spoon

2007-03-21T16:04:00.000-06:00

When Prof. Steffens asked in class today “Are we more equal than others because we’re journalists?” my knee-jerk answer was

“Heck yes. I just spend a lot of money on this degree, and it better count for something.”

Wow. I know. It sounds elitist and snobby, right?

I’ve always imagined that old-school journalists were blue-collar guys who wore fedoras with press badges in them. They rolled up their shirt, smoked the strongest cigarettes, drank the blackest coffee, and didn’t have a college education. And because they were the Everyman, they had their pulse on what the people really wanted. They had it out for the elites, which is, I think, one of the great things about journalism. (Just watch the movie Newsies.) This is what drew me to journalism. (Plus, I really wanted a fedora.)

But when I got to college, I was reading Chaucer and Aristotle, having conversations debating the existence of God, and writing words like "usurp." Not exactly the dingy, earthy newsroom I expected.

I don’t believe that journalists are the aristocracy for the people. I think they’ve become just plain aristocracy.

In two months, I’ll be a college-educated woman. I come from a college-educated family. But most of the country doesn’t. The American Association of University Women says that in 2003, only 25 percent of Americans had a college degree.

I think that many of us would agree that we come from semi-privileged backgrounds, at least. And while my salary won’t show it when I graduate, there’s a lot of room for high-paying jobs in the business. So when we, as privileged, college-educated journalists set the agenda, are we setting one that really matters to Everyman?

I’m not so sure anymore. Maybe that accounts for the decline in readership. Maybe that’s why Dan Rather said in a speech on March 12 to South by Southwest Interactive that “journalism has lost its guts,” and “more journalists have become lapdogs instead of watchdogs.” Maybe we, as human beings and as journalists, just have a tendency to empathize with people who are more like us—the powerful interviewing the powerful, as Prof. Steffens said.

As I finish writing this, I realize it’s pretty gloomy. But it doesn’t have to be this way. I think we can still write for the Everyman, and maybe civic journalism is the answer—not so that journalists can loose power, but so that the people can gain it.

The Golden Press Pass

2007-03-21T11:20:00.000-06:00

In class we discussed whether journalists were “more equal” than other people and if they have earned the privilege of meeting presidents and esteemed figures.

I think it’s important to remember the role of journalists in society. In Elements of Journalism, Kovach and Rosenstiel list monitoring power and giving a voice to the voiceless as two of the responsibilities of journalists. In order for us to do that, we need to have access to places and people that are not accessible to the average person. This is not saying that journalists are above average. It means that we represent the average person.

I think giving a voice to the voiceless is the most important role a journalist plays in society. Not everyone has the opportunity to fly to Baghdad and see the war.

Journalists bring the war into people’s living rooms. How else would a person living in Columbia’s First Ward learn the differences between two candidates? Most people are not willing to or do not have the time to sift through information and get stories for themselves. Journalists go out, experience the story and bring it back. We aren’t aristocracy, we’re liaisons. We can’t provide information without access to whom the information is about.

An example of journalists giving voices to the voiceless is the Missourian’s coverage of the last election. The reporters served as representatives and when asking a question phrased it, “Jackie Smith from the Third Ward wants to know….” This is also known as civic journalism.

Also, we need the special access to monitor power. If the elites are the only ones with access to meetings and hearings, or they didn’t have a physical person interrogating them, we’d be in trouble.

As journalists you get to see things you would never have the chance to otherwise. I think that is what draws some people in. I do NOT think most newspaper journalists go to school so they can be famous. If they did, they should try Hollywood or politics. I decided I wanted to be a journalist because I love to learn. When I do a story I want to learn everything there is to know about that subject. I find it fascinating. I also wanted to save the world, of course. I have a strong distaste for injustice and decided journalism was the best way to fight it, or at least, tell everyone about it.

I thought the discussion in class on this topic was rather negative, like journalists don’t deserve the access. I disagree. I’ve worked hard in journalism school and I take my job seriously. I’d like to think that the citizens of wherever I work will trust me enough to know that I don’t take that access for granted, yes, I earned it, but it has also been grated to me by the people.

Fencing in the watchdog

2007-03-20T21:58:00.000-06:00

Accountability – all journalists strive to hold leaders accountable. In fact, in our recent class discussion, it was this watchdog role that won out as the premier purpose of journalism. But as the public confidence in news organizations declines, to whom do wayward journalists answer? To whom are mistaken journalists accountable?

One possibility lies with news councils. These independent organizations hear and investigate complaints of unfair and inaccurate reporting. While they often cannot sanction, typically they make public statements of their findings. Such statements are newsworthy by nature and the thinking is that public denouncements are punishment enough (Silha). Currently, news councils are popular in Europe and Canada, but in the United States, only Minnesota and Washington states have implemented them. Much of news councils’ unpopularity in the U.S. has to do with their historical failure. The National News Council, the short-lived U.S. experiment, died out from lack of support and participation (Boeyink).

On the surface, the arguments for such a council are compelling. It would offer more effectual accountability. Journalists would have to answer to waning public trust and disgruntled sources. The Jason Leopolds of the industry would no longer be able to so easily hop between jobs and hide from mistakes. Also, a hearing in front of a news council offers a much cheaper alternative to a libel suit. Journalists and their companies’ lawyers would no longer quake at the cost of a lawsuit – even a winning one (Jenkins). Furthermore, the industry is changing – journalists are becoming better educated and better paid. Their personal stake in the splash a story makes is higher than ever. (Jenkins) A news council can hold the reckless individuals to industry and public standards.

However, I would argue that the impracticality, lack of support and deterring effect of news councils outweighs their possible contributions to journalism. As the industry changes rapidly with technology, the identity of a journalist becomes increasingly nebulous. Who now, will these councils hold accountable as bloggers and citizen journalists chime in? But the practical questions only begin there. The largesse of such councils, if implemented nationwide, would be excessive. There would be a professional bureaucracy of news moniters, an unnecessary venture and one that may invite its own corruption and biases. (Jenkins)

The support for such councils is mixed among journalism professionals. Unfortunately, such councils cannot survive with sparse and sporadic participation. The National News Council failed because some of the major organizations refused to play (Boeyink). These nonparticipants, such as the New York Times, have not changed their positions since, saying it’s part of their job to uphold industry standards. A news council cannot survive without the major players’ cooperation. Since that seems unlikely, forming a council would be in vain.

The more theoretical concern with news councils lies with the potential “chilling” of investigative journalism and the inability of the councils to address modern journalism’s failures. Many journalists think the regulation by councils which are partially outside the industry, its training and its challenges constitutes a slippery slope. They fear the stringent regulation that has historically challenged free and independent journalism. Independence is high on journalistic values and responsibility to an outside bureaucracy seems to injure that principle. Also, as pundits and infotainment capture and alienate audiences, news councils stand powerless to affect necessary change (Jenkins). While basic locality and institutional coverage wane, how will news councils provide an answer? In short, they can’t.

Superficially, news councils seem to apply accountability – that journalistic favorite – to the industry. But the implications of such councils may in fact injure other journalistic fervor and principle – a large price to pay in the face of impractical organization.

Sources:

Jenkins, Evan. "News Councils: The Case For and Against." Columbia Journalism Review: March/April 1997.

Silha, Stephen. "News Councils: A Meeting Place for Communities and Their Storytellers." Christian Science Monitor: August 29, 2005.

Boeyink, David. "Public Understanding, Professional Ethics and the News: A Response to Jane Rhodes." www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v47/nol/boeyink.html

Journalism: bearing witness to the storm

2007-03-20T15:04:00.000-06:00

I’ve always thought I’d use journalism as the means to an end. I like to think and write and probe, and these are skills I figured I could stand to hone, no matter the career I chose later on. Interestingly, my time as a journalist in college has afforded me the opportunity to get a sneak peak, so to speak, on the profession I truly want to pursue. Recently, after interviewing the UM System’s top lobbyist, Steve Knorr, for a profile piece, I decided I almost certainly want to be a lobbyist. I had numerous meetings with Knorr and others, together and separately, to gauge what the lobbyist’s role has been in passing the Lewis and Clark Discovery Initiative, better known as the MOHELA plan. To better get at the role of a journalist, I’ve offered my recent experience with Knorr as an example.

The role of the journalist is to bear witness to the storm -- and then to make it out alive to report on it. The week and days following up to the publication date of my profile on Knorr was a whirlwind: I wasn’t done reporting until the day I was editing. Even though it made for a more difficult time in terms of getting it ready to run, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

My meeting with Knorr up until the last minute, in addition to Sen. Chuck Graham, meant I had the most current information. With an issue such as the MOHELA plan and other time-sensitive subject, it’s important for the journalist to keep up. Otherwise, he or she seems wooden and distant. About a month ago, when I first met with Knorr and Rep. Jeff Harris, Harris’ withdrawing his support for the initiative seemed like the most important element of the MOHELA debate. Now, it seems like a mere sliver.

As a journalist, one must be in it for the long haul, willing to see all sides and, if necessary, divert from the original course of action to get a more accurate glimpse of the story.

Working with Knorr was tough. He was skeptical from the beginning, and I’m still not sure why he let me meet with him. I think he thought I seemed harmless. So, initially, I always played this up with him. I would ask questions I knew the answer to. This may seem too canny, but I believe it worked for me with him. He felt like he was guiding me along on the MOHELA plan, letting me in on what it’s like to be a lobbyist. I would argue I was let in on his world by questioning and observing him, even in a somewhat stressful circumstance. (Initially, our meeting was more staged and formal; later, it was less so.)

As a journalist, one has to be willing to play the part of the person whom he or she is interviewing. In fact, the reason I believe Knorr allowed me to report on him was that, though I was young, I seemed prepared and wouldn’t necessarily “stick out” as he was making his way around the Capitol to meet with legislators.

When we first met, he was also less consumed with MOHELA, more optimistic. A month later, he was in the middle of it and seemed more worn down. Because we had sort of built up a relationship, he let me stay "in" anyway.

As a journalist, a person also has to be sensitive of timing and the way the subject fits into the debate.

Knorr has a lot riding on getting the plan passed, including, maybe, his job. I tried to be careful with this. And because he let me “in” on his world, I felt grateful. Interestingly, my recognition of this rare access I was getting meant I felt sort of loyal to him. This wasn’t a problem, really, until I spoke with Graham. Up until the very end, no one was willing to speak openly against Knorr, no one willing to allude he might curry too much favor with the governor’s office. Even in private with Harris, Harris always spoke highly of Knorr.

Perhaps the biggest thing I’ll take from this story is that reading blogs pays off. When I began researching Knorr and his background and people’s perception of him, I stumbled across an entry on the Web site firedup.com, a sort of liberal political blog on Missouri state politics. The blog, while not really substantiated, seemed to speculate that Knorr was knee deep in the Republican Party and, it argued, too close to the governor.

Whether it is true, I don’t know. But I found a source, Graham, who was willing to say it. And I think he said it somewhat candidly because he was tired from the debate. People seem most willing to talk when they’re tired. So, that was the hook. But that didn’t happen until the day before the story ran. And although I felt “bad” about making Knorr look a little bad when he had let me profile him, I knew it had to be in there no matter what.

This, to me, is a journalist’s supreme job: to take all the elements of a story, even if initially it’s mere speculation, and break it down into something more manageable for the reader.

I’m not sure why I loved working on this story so much or why, for that matter, I used it as an example of journalists' role. Certainly, I made mistakes and still wonder if I covered everything I needed to cover in this debate.

But perhaps this experience as a journalist sticks out to me because I felt truly fascinated by what Knorr does, how much clout he has in the legislature for someone who’s largely unknown to the general public. This fascination seemed to carry me through -- and made me wish I felt this way about every story I work on.

Sources, I believe, can tell when you’re interested in who they are and how they get by in life. I would argue, then, that journalists have to feign interest, no matter how disinterested they are, in order to find the crux of a debate. And perhaps, too, journalists have to seem far removed, no matter how much he or she wants to jump in on a debate (as was my case with Knorr), so as not to seem too vested.

Journalism and why I love role-playing

2007-03-20T11:45:00.000-06:00

There are many different hats that journalists wear. One minute, we’re informers. The next, we’re entertainers. We’re facilitators — moderating the social conversations between officials and citizens. Then maybe we take a break for lunch. Nice pastrami on rye, some jalapeno chips, maybe even a beer if it has already been a long day. Back from lunch, we may have to put on our watchdog hat — corruption is all around us, after all. Maybe late in the day we’ll champion the voice of the unheard. I don’t know, maybe there won’t be time. The point is, depending on beat assignments, breaking news, location and myriad other elements, journalist’s roles can be a lot of different things — maybe even at the same time.

Above all, I would say journalists are informers. We’re “Johnny-on-the-spot” if you will. While this might not be the most important role journalism plays, the content that fills up most papers around the country is straight information. From the beginning, we’re told the easiest way to write up a story is by giving the who, what, when, where, why and how of a given event. Many people simply look to the paper to get this from the headlines and lead paragraphs of a story. When this happens, journalists are fulfilling their role as informers — whether the news is international, national or local is of little importance.

Moving into a role of greater importance, journalists provide a checks and balances to government, business and other institutions. Because of journalists, I think that city and public officials are held accountable for promises and practices. This also ties in with journalists’ roles as investigative watchdogs. Obviously, corrupt officials or business owners would not simply inform local news outlets of wrongdoing and, thus, journalists serve an important role as the people who dig for and unearth these stories. This is something the public clearly expects of the press, since a lot of criticism was meted out following the discovery that the Bush administration had misconstrued facts about findings in Iraq.

When it comes to issues like the War in Iraq, the Enron scandal, or high-profile court cases like the recent one of Scooter Libby, journalists must also play the role of analyst. Because of the complexities of many stories, and the fact the journalists have access to sources and documents the general public does not, it is an important for journalists to go beyond the five W’s and H to explain the multiple facets of stories. In is one thing to report the scandal surrounding Enron — it is another entirely to connect it to issues of energy privatization, its effect on the economy as a whole, the implications for the future of its employees, etc. People turn to journalists to tell them what these stories mean.

While on the topic of Enron, another important role of journalism is to provide a voice to the underprivileged and disenfranchised. Without the ability to call press conferences or access the media in the form of press releases, journalists must give the everyday person a platform for telling their story. Journalists must serve minority groups, public stockholders, laid-off employees and more.

As I was discussing the five most important roles of journalists with my group on Monday, we found it difficult to rank them, and I think this has a lot to do with what I just mentioned — journalists are often wearing multiple hats. Journalists are always acting as gatekeepers and moderators — simply by choosing to pick one story over another, importance is being communicated to an audience. Similarly, while we didn’t include entertainer in our list, journalists are nonetheless writing entertainment stories every day, and entertainment might be tied in with our role as informer. Journalism is a business constantly in flux — it changes according to societal, technological and professional developments. Because of this, journalists must be ready and willing to fulfill several roles.

Journalism Ethics and Technology

2007-02-26T00:30:00.000-06:00

To say that technology can have a negative impact on certain aspects of journalism and the practice of journalistic ethics isn’t necessarily wrong (in fact I’m sure it’s true in a lot of cases), but it is a little bit misleading. Technology does bring added pressure to be the first with the story, to tell the story in a flashy way, even to tell the story people want to hear rather than what they probably need to hear. But desire to be first rather than best has been around for over 100 years, since Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst squared off in the late 1800's. It is not by any means a new phenomenon, and I’m sure there were people denouncing the rise of yellow journalism as a byproduct of the new desire for speed (weeklies had become dailies) and sensationalism then as there are now.
Of course, the numbers have changed a little bit. Days have become hours, minutes and seconds, and there’s no doubt that the pressure to post stories early and often has heightened over the past several years. But keep in mind, we are talking about newspapers, here. The argument that technological advancement in the print industry has led to the ability to move quickly, which has in turn led to a greater propensity for error, hinges on the idea that newspapers have really bought into the hype. And I think that’s a difficult argument to make.
In other media, I’d agree, the need for speed really has changed the game. In the early days of television, for example, the news was updated only a few times a day, once in the morning and once or twice at night. That changed in the early ‘80s with the advent of CNN. Suddenly, the news spun on a 24 hour cycle. Not only did producers have to come up with more news to fill the void, they had to do it more quickly and in the face of greater competition. This of course led to some mistakes, a notable one I can remember involving the West Virginia mining tragedy of a few years ago, when news outlets initially reported that all but one of the victims had survived. They eventually had to go back and inform the public (and some of the families) that somebody had heard wrong, and that they’d jumped the gun. In reality, all but one of the victims had died. In this case, the desire to be the first with the story led to a tragic bit of misinformation.
But when newspapers hit the stands the next day, they got the story right. There wasn’t a mention – outside the coverage of the original gaffe – of the error that had caused the broadcast media so much embarrassment. The point is that newspapers remain the most poured over, edited medium, even the online versions. In certain cases, they have the luxury of watching the news cycle evolve from outside it. They can take their time and decide what to report and what not to report, what is credible and what isn’t. On that front, I’d be curious to know how many newspapers actually update their websites on a regular basis more often than once a day. I’d venture to say the online aspect doesn’t change error frequency as much as one might think. The paper I grew up reading (the Post-Dispatch) very rarely updates their website more than once per day (unless it’s to run new AP stories or to run updated versions of stories from the previous day), so the likelihood of error on that front isn’t all that great.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems on the horizon. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that there is panic spreading through the newspaper community: readership is falling, apathy and competition are rising. But there will always be a niche for newspapers in some form. Online readership, while low relative to circulation numbers, is at an all-time high, and there will never be a better way to produce and distribute local news than through the newspaper. As long as the editors and reporters who make up the medium keep in mind that there will always be room for newspapers – and by that I mean for informative, accurate and trustworthy information – maybe the pressures of technological innovation won’t be too much to bear.

Let's do what we do best

2007-02-25T17:58:00.000-06:00

Technology constantly is improving upon itself and creating new forms of communication. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, telephones, the Internet and who knows what is next — all are a result of technology and improved our ability to be better journalists. With that, they also improved our ability to become more ethical journalists.

With the spread of communication, our ability and speed to check information in our stories, in theory, should be near perfect. You can double check information with sources in person, over the phone, through e-mail or by message over a social networking Web site. You can check information you get in documents or from sources against countless other sources online, many of which are accurate. If discrepancies pop up, it’s easy to contact experts you look up on the Internet or talk to the people involved.

With greater technology, we can now figure out who good sources might be for stories. This is no substitute for going to an event, as proved by Jason Leopold in his book News Junkie, but it is a great starting point to do great reporting on an event. We also have the ability to easily figure out what other stories have been done on a topic in the past. Vast databases contain many papers’ works, so writers’ originality can be checked and new ideas can be easily formulated.

And seeing how many journalists in recent memory have been busted for making up sources, information and stories in their entirety, you would think that if nothing else, the fear of being caught lying would be enough to keep journalists ethical. After all, names can be looked up in a fraction of a second, a paragraph cut-and-pasted into a story is quickly traceable and made up events can be debunked by a quick check on the Web.

So why do these lies, in an age where our work should be better than ever, continue happening?

To start with, I think there’s too much of a rush to get things up on the Internet first. Leopold clearly wanted to be the one breaking news about the California energy crisis, and I think his situation is very similar to those other journalists across the country face. If you simply replace the words “California energy crisis” with any other significant breaking news event, I’m sure there are people willing to sacrifice a little integrity in order to be the one to break the news.

Integrity, to me, is putting out the most accurate and well-reported story you can. Yes, there’s always a source that breaks the news, but if you break with something that contains inaccuracies or is flat-out wrong, what’s the point of doing it?

The stories that break almost always bypass the copy desk, an essential part of putting out a quality story. The errors in a story could be caught within 20 minutes. Putting something up 20 minutes after another source, but having the story grammatically correct and error-free seems worth the wait to me.

I've had friends who go to news Web sites and read online editions of papers point out mistakes many of these sites make in a rush to be first. I was reading a breaking story about the Royals signing a player on ESPN.com just a few months ago, when it mentioned a player named Billy Buckner, a hot minor league prospect. I was confused for a moment, but soon realized they must have meant Billy Butler, a good-hitting outfielder. Mistakes like these make it look like journalists could care less about being right as long as they slop something together quickly. It’s an embarrassment to the profession.

There will always be competition for the title of who breaks a story first, but I still think there’s a demand for the best-reported, best-written story out there amongst the readers. It’s the reason I chose the newspaper path, because I think we ultimately have the ability to do just that. Leave the competition for who did it first to the other guys, and let’s put out the best work that we can. I think people want and need it.

The greatest opportunity

2007-02-24T13:39:00.000-06:00

I don’t think technology is the problem here. It’s the teaching and development of ethics that are at fault.

The problem with rapidly-developing technology and journalistic ethics is that the technology is actually developing past journalism’s ethical development. Journalists have been developing ethical philosophies for since Americans were granted free speech – and they still haven’t perfected an absolute, widely-accepted philosophy, beyond “don’t plagiarize” and “don’t make things up.”

Rather than focus the discussion on journalistic ethics as applied to technology, the conversation should concern ethical basics. The problem is that we – not just as journalists, but as general people – don’t know how to deal with ethics. It’s just not something that everyone learns as they grow and mature. Even if our parents did teach us that it was wrong to lie, we didn’t learn much more than that: it was wrong and you’d get a spanking. We need to learn about ethics early, often and in context.

This applies to budding journalists, too. Perhaps journalism students should be required to take a full course on journalistic ethics, as opposed to discussing it in a few class periods of each journalism class we take. We should learn what ethics are early in our education and not wait to have these discussions until our final class in our final semester of study. And perhaps that course shouldn’t just be about journalistic ethics. To understand such a complex subject, we need to have broad understanding of how ethics apply to daily life. For example, is it okay to change the date and time of a late blog post to make it appear you turned it in on time? (Obviously, according to my ethics it is not.) It’s not just about how to make an ethical decision – we need to know the actual definition of “ethical” and how it relates to societal values and personal morals.

And, as both journalists and regular people, it needs to be okay when we make mistakes. No, you can’t constantly make bad decisions and expect to keep your job (or A+), but you should be able to make a slip up or two as you go. Just like technology, the components of ethical decision-making are ever-changing. It has to be okay to make some less-than-kosher ethical judgments, partly because we are always learning, partly because the situations are always changing and mostly because there is no universal correct answer.

Technology hasn’t created problems for this business; it’s created opportunities. Opportunities for 24-hour news services, Internet source databases, convergence of all news mediums. But the most important opportunity offered is the one that allows journalists to reassess our ethics – the process of decision-making, the teaching – and make true advances in perfection.

Technology and Dissemination

2007-02-23T23:58:00.000-06:00

I have often worried about monopolies on information. If one corporation controls what people read, hear and watch, it can affectively control what people know and maybe even how people think. Journalists began expressing this concern as more and more cities lost competing newspapers. It came about again with the Telecommunication Acts when corporations began controlling multiple forms of media in a single city.

High speed Internet, in theory, should rest my troubled mind. Today, Americans can compare multiple news sources. The New York Times’ version of the truth can be checked against a U.S. government website, which can be compared to reports from television stations abroad. Information flows unrestrained and freely across different media, corporations, cities, and countries. This technological development is nothing short of a democratic necessity today.

Before I sing praise and glory to online journalism, I must point out a serious flaw: it is a medium for the middle class and elite.

According to 2003 U.S. Census data, only 54.7 percent of American households had Internet access at home. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between Internet access and household income was inversely correlated. A staggering 92 percent of households making $100,000 or more had Internet access, while only 41 percent of households making less than $25,000 a year had access.

If newspapers are attempting to follow the money in America, they would be wise to focus resources on their websites and online reports. Corporations could even be advised to hurry along the seemingly inevitable deaths of slower, costlier and less interactive print media. However, if there are CEO’s out there who believe in informing the masses and journalism for democracy, perhaps they find this new emphasis on technology in the newsroom slightly bothersome.

The emergence of the penny press in the 1830’s was another type of information revolution. Average American’s could now afford to read about the political and economic happenings in their cities. Moreover, these papers were written in a way that the average man could understand. While the content strayed towards entertainment and sensationalism, the ideal of news for the masses was there. Technology has seemingly outgrown the desire to inform the masses that was present with Gutenberg’s invention and golden days of newspapers.

Where the fine line between elite interests or financial success and serving the greater good falls is hazy at best. The amount and depth of information on the Internet is staggering and inspiring for those who seek to inform. It takes very little to get swept away in enthusiasm for the endless possibilities of technology. The simple invent of search engines and archives have changed journalism for the better, adding background and context to stories, which were once ephemeral. Clearly the ability to read the same story from five different reliable newspapers with the click of a mouse and with no additional cost (aside from computer and access), is serving democracy better.

Yes, the Internet serves people well. Except for, of course, the 45.3 percent of Americans who don’t have Internet access at home. To be honest, I couldn’t find statistics on how many of the unconnected individuals get Internet access at work or at local libraries. But the simple fact remains, that an informed public is key to democracy, and online journalism simply fails to inform the masses.

A middle ground must be found between rushing feet first into the best and most expensive media and providing free newspapers on every street corner or every doorstep in low-income neighborhoods.

"A Bloggers' Code of Ethics"

2007-02-23T23:35:00.000-06:00

Lately at my apartment, the internet seems to go out about once a week for a period of a couple days. It’s an extremely frustration situation when I can’t check my e-mail, browse my favorite Web sites and use the internet for homework, of course. We all have our routines every day including checking our favorite Web sites, however, I don’t think we really understand how much we rely on the internet until we can’t use it. This situation, as incredibly irritating it has been for me, has actually been an eye-opener because it’s made me realize how much I really do rely on the internet and technology.

The internet is just like any other tool we have available to us. You can look up information for a story in a book, but why waste the time finding the book when you could have looked it up on the internet before you got out the door? While the internet makes us more efficient and information much more readily available, it has its drawbacks, of course. Sometimes people are in such a hurry to get the information quickly or break a story, that they overlook the fact that the information might not be credible. This includes journalists even though some wouldn’t like to admit it. Clearly, technology can be a curse to journalists as we saw with Jason Leopold and his book, News Junkie. Leopold was so focused on being the first to break a story that he put the ethics of journalism aside. While many are so focused on whether journalists are following the code of ethics related to technology, they seem to forget the idea that an ethical journalist is going to be ethical with or without the internet. The code of ethics for a medium such as broadcast or print, isn’t really different than the online community.

In the online community, bloggers have an ethical obligation to their readers just as much as a newspaper does. To be clear, whether the bloggers are journalists or not, not all are going to feel they have an ethical obligation to their readers, only the responsible ones. To reporters and bloggers alike, the foundation of credibility is integrity. Just like a reporter, a blogger who fails to report the truth is going to lose credibility and their readership. Responsible bloggers should recognize that anyone has the capability to read what they write and therefore they should understand that they have certain ethical obligations to their readers. But just how strict should these ethical obligations be? Like I said before, a bloggers’ code of ethics shouldn’t be much different than a trained reporter.

Founded in 2000, cyberjournalist.net is edited and published by Jonathan Dube, an award-winning online and print journalist. The Web site identifies itself as “a news and resource site that focuses on how the Internet, convergence and new technologies are changing the media.” In order to create a code of ethics for the blog world, Dube modified the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics. Titled a “Bloggers’ Code of Ethics”, it was created to give guidelines to bloggers so that they can practice ethical publishing. The first main idea in the code is to be honest and fair. This includes being transparent to your readers about sources, not publishing questionable information and distinguishing between fact and commentary. So far, sounds like a code that reporters and newspapers practice. The next main point is to minimize harm. This includes being sensitive to those affected by tragedy or grief and even references to laws about privacy when it comes to public vs. private figures. Again, these guidelines are quite similar to ones journalists practice as well. The final point of the Bloggers’ Code is to be accountable. Admitting and correcting mistakes, disclosing conflicts of interest and exposing the unethical practices of other bloggers are all parts of that idea. Yes, technology can be a shortcut for journalists which can harm their ability to be ethical. But, it doesn’t have to be. As long as journalists remember the principles in which ethical journalism (blog or not) is practiced, I think we will be just fine.

Blogging reporters

2007-02-23T23:28:00.000-06:00

The future of journalism, or more particularly the grim future of newspaper journalism, lies in the hands of technology. Newspaper readership is declining and people are turning to the Internet more and more. So it makes sense that technological improvements be made in order for the news to reach more people.

Though these improvements can pose challenges to the journalists who are trying to make best use of the new technology. Often these are ethical challenges.

An example of this is blogs, namely reporters who blog. The popularity of blogs has grown dramatically over the past few years, and now nearly anyone with access to a computer and something to say can put their thoughts online. There are few barriers to posting blogs, especially when it comes to requirements that what is posted is accurate and ethical.

With so many people today being able to blog, it seems journalists should be no exception. Though there are a few issues to take into consideration before jumping to the conclusion that reporters should be able to have blogs just like anyone else.

It makes sense to encourage people who have reporting experience to maintain blogs. The writing likely will be more accurate and better researched than a lot of what is out there.
But a line should be drawn when it comes to journalists blogging about any kind of personal issues. Reporters discussing their political leanings or personal biases, which certainly all people have, could put their skills into question.

If a journalist writes about being liberal, then readers could attack the journalist’s story about a Republican candidate as being slanted. The story might have been completely accurate and objective, but the blog gave people reason to believe it wasn’t.

Studies show the public’s skepticism of print journalism. Readers increasingly don’t view newspapers as the most trustworthy source of news. Reporters blogging about their personal lives just furthers that problem. Newspapers should make an attempt to prohibit their writers from keeping this kind of blog. At this point it’s not a matter or censorship or stifling anyone’s expression, it’s preserving the integrity of the paper that hopefully will lead to an audience that is more inclined to believe what it reads in the paper.

Though there is some value in encouraging reporters to blog. Blogs can be a valuable tool when it comes to promoting transparency.

A blog can give reporters room to be ethical in their work. They can describe how they did their reporting and how they found their sources. That is not to say they should give away everything they have worked hard to uncover so that another paper can steal the information. But rather, journalists perform a public service, so the public has a right to know how a journalist reported a story.

Many of the problems Jason Leopold ran into related to his methods for gaining information, meaning the lying he did to get what he wanted. Ideally that is not how journalism should be done.
Technology in the case of blogs can help promote ethical decisions and actions among journalists. The News about the News talked about the work that people in newsrooms put into determining how to report and present a news story.

“In our experience, newspaper people are more conscious of the risks inherent in their enterprise that readers might realize. In the newsroom . . . bright people worry intently with one another over how to handle the news, what leads to chase, how to write and present complex stories” (74).

There isn’t always space in a newspaper for a reporter to be transparent about the reporting process, but a blog allows for that, which hopefully will lead to more ethical journalism.

Readers often do not realize the work that can go into a single story. Countless decisions are made, rewriting is done and editors are consulted all to produce a 12-inch story. But the readers just get the words on the page.

The News about the News discussed New York Times reporter Doug Frantz and the story he did on Scientology. “Asked if he thought ordinary newspaper readers understood how investigative reporters worked, Frantz said, ‘I think people don’t understand the difficulty in getting information. They really think that the press conferences they see on TV are the way everybody gets every story’” (41).

A blog can help people understand the process an investigate reporter goes through. It can include the details of all the work that goes into a story, which normally wouldn’t be printed or published anywhere.

Guarding credibility

2007-02-23T22:22:00.000-06:00

It’s almost hard to imagine a world where we couldn’t have information at our fingertips. If I don’t know something I google it and instantly find an answer. While these search engines, news sites and information mills can be very helpful, this need for immediate response and constant information can also be dangerous. The need to know quickly has overtaken the need for accuracy. Journalists have been willing to sacrifice their credibility—the most important thing they can hold onto—to hold the coveted title of “first” out of the gate.

In Elements of Journalism, John Seeley Brown, former director of Xerox PARC, says how he thinks changing technology has affected journalist’s role: “What we need in the new economy and the new communications culture is sense making. We have a desperate need to get some stable points in an increasingly crazy world.”

But, for some, the new age of technology has not caused journalists to make sense of the crazy world, but rather jump right into the frenetic pace. In News Junkie, Jason Leopold’s case may seem extreme at first. His journalistic ethics seem to become nearly nonexistent in his quest to win the news game. But his example may not be as isolated and obscure as what it seems. Everyday journalists are faced with ethical questions and dilemmas they never had years ago. Should I publish the story right now even though we aren’t sure just to make sure we’re first? Can I insert this information in my story from wikipedia? I can’t find it anywhere else, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.

Although the internet can be a significant help in finding information it can also be detrimental when reporters rely solely upon it without checking facts. The paper I worked at this summer recently ran a story that said the person would not return phone calls but a Google search had revealed certain information. It’s sad when reporters are relying on Google to get information they once got through hard work. Newfound technology not only has the capability for reporters to sacrifice accuracy for timeliness, like Jason Leopold, but also, to become lazy and simply sit on their computer and publish whatever information they find on the internet without ensuring its reliability.

So why is it that a little bit of copying and pasting, not quite checking all the facts to be quick and getting some information from your story from Wikipedia can be so harmful to journalism? The answer is simple. Journalism’s cornerstone—its legitimacy—rest in one thing—credibility.
In The Elements of Journalism, Kovach and Rosensteil say, “Since there are no laws of journalism, no regulations, no licensing and no formal self-policing, and since journalism by its nature can be exploitative, a heavy burden rests on the ethics and judgment of the individual journalist and the individual organization where he or she works.”

Ultimately, it’s up to you and me. We are the ones that will be faced with ethical dilemmas where we are forced to decide if it’s okay to bend the truth or cross the line to get the story. One of the most concerning things I heard from Jason Leopold was not in his book but when he spoke to us in class and basically said journalists have special rights. Although he negated later that he meant journalists were above the law, I think that’s an attitude many journalists can easily adopt. It’s okay if I bend these rules, if this information isn’t quite right, because the people need to know.

Whenever journalists forget their responsibility to the people that they are serving they are potentially not only sacrificing their own credibility, but the credibility of journalists everywhere. While technology serves many good purposes, it is also important to guard against it corrupting the soul of journalism.

Technology and Journalism Ethics

2007-02-23T22:05:00.000-06:00

Technological advances in recent years have opened the doors to a wide range of possibilities for journalists. We now have infinitely more ways to gather, edit, produce and disseminate substantive information to a broad audience in a much timelier manner. But as technology has ushered in a new age of information, it has also brought about a plethora of new ethical problems and dilemmas. The challenge for current and future journalists is to take advantage of the beneficial aspects of new technology while maintaining traditional journalistic values and ethics.

Technology has been especially helpful in the production of news, as the Internet and computer programs have revolutionized the production process. As we discussed in class, copy editors can now fact-check names and other information in half the time with a simple online search. In turn, this shorter production time allows reporters more time to focus on getting accurate, complete information that provides context and depth.

Online publishing also provides a new opportunities to serve the public interest and hold the powerful accountable. (1) With online records searches and computerized databases, journalists have even more opportunities for investigative research and reporting. News organizations can communicate breaking news and urgent information to a wide audience in a short time through text casting, RSS feeds and other tools. And because the Internet allows two-way communication between the news media and its audience, it encourages citizen participation and community discussion on important issues and events. Better communication with readers and the public allows journalists to stay more informed of community interests and concerns, and it helps to ensure the media report the news accurately, fairly and completely.

But for all the benefits of computer technology and the Internet, there are just as many — if not more — professional and ethical challenges for journalists. There are innumerable problems related to blogging and Web publishing that, when combined, can produce a “stew that can turn from tasty to troubling.” (2) Perhaps the most important ethical dilemma associated with online journalism is the need to “balance the value of serving readers with timely, immediate information versus the value of providing them with accurate, fair, complete and carefully vetted information.” (2) Journalists must walk the line between being first and being right.

In many situations, the ability and desire to be the first one out of the gate with a story can push the boundaries of acceptable journalistic practices. For Jason Leopold, the rush of breaking a story completely overshadowed any concerns about ethics or accuracy. “I didn’t care about ethics,” Leopold says. “I didn’t even think about ethical violations. I just wanted to be the first one to get to the truth.” (3) Although Leopold’s behavior may be more extreme than that of most reporters, the temptation to cut corners is nonetheless an issue for many journalists. In an industry that rewards speed, accuracy can become an afterthought. Even small news organizations, such as the Missourian, may be beginning to adopt a policy of “post now, check later.” Of course, when stories are completely accurate, this strategy can be very rewarding. But when they’re not, the results can be disastrous.

In addition, computer technology also presents opportunities to alter or falsify information. With the click of a button, a journalist can easily manipulate a photograph, alter the contents of a document or create a fake e-mail. Journalists can now even alter or falsify information in their resumes and portfolios. With electronic versions, it’s relatively simple to re-do a reporting, editing or design clip to improve it or fix an error. Technology has made misrepresentation much easier — and much more tempting.

The Internet and other technologies have given journalists boundless tools with which to improve and perfect their craft. But the same tools that enable us to serve the public good are full of opportunities for ethical missteps. While our technological abilities have advanced, journalists have not yet developed a comprehensive set of ethical guidelines to manage the challenges of a changing industry. It is essential that ethical discussions related to these changes continue to take place in classrooms and newsrooms as we continue to struggle with the limitless capabilities of technology and online journalism.

(1) “Online Journalism Ethics: Guidelines from the Conference.” The Poynter Institute. http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=117350. Updated: 11 February 2007.
(2) Steele, Bob. “Helter Skelter No More: An Evolving Guidebook for Online Ethics.” The Poynter Institute. http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=117347&sid=32. Updated: 1 February 2007.
(3) Leopold, Jason. News Junkie. Los Angeles: Process Media, 2006. pp. 201.

Technology's just another tool

2007-02-23T21:58:00.000-06:00

Technology, especially the Internet, poses new ethical issues in journalism. However, these issues are qualified by some of the advantages that technology can offer a journalist. The biggest technological ethical dilemma that faces the industry today is the temptation to cut corners. Everything is available so quickly, so easily online. Facts are at once quickly verifiable and yet, everything on the Internet is painted with a brush of unreliability. The question we have to ask ourselves is how much trust we want to put into internet sources. In addition, email and other messaging technologies pose their own sets of problems. How much credibility should we give to an interview if it is done electronically, without eye contact and body language feedback? In a worst case scenario, can we ever believe people are who they say they are online.
The example of the New York Times investigation into the online lives of gay teenagers was a complex one. It mixed all of the ingredients of an ethical dilemma and a good story: minors, the internet, sexual behavior and the scariest one of all for journalists: anonymity. The internet is replete with anonymous communication. Commentary on blogs, message board threads and topics, and messaging can all be done with screen names, nicknames or even fabricated names. When identities and communication on the Internet are so easily masked where are the lines between investigation, invasion and illusion marked?
This is not to say that technology does not present ethical solutions in journalism as well. Whether or not it is always reliable the Internet can also be looked at as just one more way to verify a fact. It is also another way to gather information, a very good one. It “broadens the net.” In a “big-picture” construct, the Internet is uniquely able to increase the number and type of voices that are able to participate in public debate. This is especially true with blogs, and certainly a reason for their appeal. There is a cost barrier associated with this otherwise equalizing characteristic of the Internet. Only those who can afford access get it. This is something that is currently tempered by the fact that computers are readily available in public libraries and other such places. Eventually, the technology will become something that everyone can afford, like a radio or landline phone.
It will require care and thought, but there is no reason why the desire to cut corners or mislead sources should be so great that technology erases all the ethical lessons from four years in journalism school. Technology certainly has many challenges to offer journalists. However, the good that technology brings outweighs all of its potential pitfalls. This is because while technology poses new and interesting ethical questions, these questions are still answered the same way they were in that long long ago before Bluetooth and blogging. We can answer new questions with the good old quest for transparency. The principle of public good outweighing private interest does not lose its meaning just because we are looking to message boards or using iChat.

Row, row, row your boat...

2007-02-23T21:57:00.000-06:00

By Stephen Nellis

Technology brings new temptations for journalists. Reaching audiences instantaneously – previously the province of only broadcast media – is at any news outlet’s disposal via the internet. The internet also brings possibilities that no one could have envisioned a decade ago: the ability to give readers a practically limitless amount of information, if they want it.

All of this means a mixed bag for news ethics. In some ways, in some ways it’ll be easier to act ethically and some ways it’ll be markedly more difficult. At the very least, technology will amplify and make salient the strengths, weaknesses and inconsistencies in the various ethical codes (or lack thereof) at play in the media world.

Let’s say we’re a newspaper and we report a fact that’s wrong. In the pre-Web days, you had a few options. You could do the right thing and put your tail between your legs and write a correction the next day. If the fact were never going to come up again in a story, you could simply remain silent. Or you could employ the favorite trick of the fine folks over at the Columbia’s evening newspaper: the row-back, wherein the newspaper corrects itself without ever acknowledging an error in a previous story, pretending as though the previous, erroneous story never happened.

Let’s say we’re an evening newspaper and we publish a story online for the lunch rush in traffic. Unbeknownst to online editors, the story has an error in it, but a hawk-eyed designer catches the error before it makes the print version of the paper and corrects the faulty fact. The online version, however, has been up for two hours and has already been read by thousands of readers, error and all. Internet publishing technology puts forth a new way to be unethical: Correct the online version of the story to make it match the print story and don’t tell anybody. If those thousands of people who read the story online choose to read it again in the paper, they’ll probably scratch their heads when it doesn’t square with what they read earlier in the day on the Web. When they go back to check the Web, they’ll see it matches the print version of the story -- and probably think it’s time to see a shrink.

(Disclosure: I don’t mean to insinuate that any evening newspaper in Columbia is guilty of anything like the above scenario.)

So here we see that the relative impermanence of digital media – there’s no way for a reader to tell if an online story has been updated – has created a new problem. We’ve gone from facing the ethical specter of a row-back to the specter of a memory hole, Orwell style. Unless readers printed out a story or saved it to their hard disk, a newspaper can play Big Brother all it wants.

Of course, newspapers won’t make the memory hole a policy. Many large metro newspapers are already acting ethically with online content by permanently attaching corrections when they occur. But the very possibility of an undetectable row-back adds new temptation, and some outlets are sure to give in. And as we’ve seen, threats to journalism’s integrity anywhere unfortunately tend to translate to threats to journalism’s credibility everywhere.

There is, however, a silver lining to the memory hole problem: bloggers. (Incidentally, there’s a fascinating blog called the Memory Hole that’s garnered significant mainstream attention.) For each new opportunity the internet opens up for new organizations to act unethically, it opens up another for a blogger to call the news organization’s misstep out before an audience. In other words, if you work for a high profile news organization and you screw up, you can count on someone catching you.

In an ideal world, acting ethically would mean acting the same no matter what the possibility of getting caught. But we don’t live in that ideal world, and that’s neither a wholly good nor wholly bad thing. The certainty of getting caught straightens you up pretty quick. To be sure, internet publishing technology opens up new ways for news organizations to break old ethical guidelines, but it also opens up new ways for those readers whom the guidelines are designed to ultimately benefit to hold news organizations accountable.

Ethics and Technology

2007-02-23T20:08:00.000-06:00

Technology. Without it, our lives would be completely different. Technology impacts me, a lazy college student, starting at the very beginning of my day. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is go to weather.com to see how cold it is outside. Then I check my e-mail before logging into Facebook (of course) to see how many people poked me the night before.

So, how does technology impact our ability to be ethical journalists?

Technology can be very helpful. Trying to find a source? Where do I go? The Internet. Fact-checking? The first place I go is the Internet. For journalists, technology makes things faster.

Technology has also enhanced how people get their news. When I want to know more about breaking news, I turn on the television and head straight to my news Web site of choice. News Web sites have changed drastically in the last few years. Newspaper Web sites are no longer only regurgitating what their print editions say. Now we see up-to-the-minute news and more in-depth coverage that might not have had space in print. In addition, more and more news sites are including other forms of journalism just as video and audio clips as well as interactive graphics.

Technology can also have a negative impact. While Internet is great from getting information on the spot, sometimes this information isn't so trust-worthy. When I first heard about Anna Nicole Smith dying, I went straight to Google News to see what had happened. One site said she died at the hospital after overdosing on sleeping pills. Another site said she was found died in her hotel and insinuated that she had died because of her use of TrimSpa.

This example is just one way technology has failed us, as journalists. People are so eager to be the first to break a story that lines are blurred and fact-checking is compromised.

Technology can have a positive impact on our ability to be ethical journalists if we are smart about how we use it. If we get lazy or too eager, technology can hurt our ethics, too.

Join the Club

2007-02-23T20:04:00.000-06:00

Technology and journalism. Admittedly this is a subject I’ve gotten really tired of discussing. It’s here, it’s not going anywhere, so we better just get used to it and learn how to use it responsibly. Bloggers aren’t going away either, so we should accept them and their effects on our craft and people’s perceptions of the media. We can complain and feel as entitled as we want, but that’s not going to change the evolving reality of our field.

Technology is great for journalism. It gives us exposure to more people. Even though I’m sitting in Columbia, MO, I can watch my hometown news or read my hometown newspaper on their respective websites. Now, anyone can read the New York Times if she wants to. It helps to keep more people more informed on any subject they want. Isn’t it a main part of our job to disseminate information – why would we be against something that could help us do that in a more widespread and efficient manner? Technology is such an amazing asset to journalism. At one point it was revolutionary to have 24 hour news on TV. Then it moved to breaking news at any time on websites. Now we have the ability to get to people through their cell phones, which they most likely have with them at all times!

Technology, if used responsibly, can only make stories better and more accurate. Anything can be looked up at any moment. It makes it much easier to fact check. It makes it much easier to find sources, through the huge number of social networking sites that are available. When I did my NewSunday cover story on ethanol, finding people to talk to was a piece of cake. I found farmers through the Missouri Corn Growers’ Association webiste. I found ethanol plants in Missouri by googling “ethanol plants in Missouri.” The only source that I found the “old-fashioned way” was a restaurant owner in the extremely small town where a large ethanol plant is located. I cannot imagine how much more difficult it was for journalists to find a multitude of sources before the internet.

Now while I am a huge proponent of technology, I realize that it can have some drawbacks. With the rapid pace of news that technology spurs on there is going to be more competition. This seemed to be Jason Leopold’s problem as described in News Junkie. There is so much pressure to be first and fastest that people often make errors trying to break a story. Also, not every website out there is credible. However, if journalists are just educated about how to find credible websites and check their facts against other sources then this would not be a problem.

I think this is something that definitely needs to be addressed at the J-school. There are students out there who think that Wikipedia or some “expert’s” blog is a credible source. Clearly this is not so. Wikipedia is frequently wrong, and anyone out there could call himself an expert. Education is the key. If there was a small unit in one of the introductory journalism classes addressing this, then I think it would go a long way.

Technology also gives ample opportunity for cheating and plagiarism. However it also makes it easier to catch someone who is making numerous errors or plagiarizing. Almost every news outlet has a searchable website. If someone is so bold to copy something from another news outlet without crediting them, then they are just looking to get caught. As it happens, those people will be punished (probably fired) and made examples of (i.e. Jayson Blair) and fewer instances of plagiarism will occur.

While technology can sometimes hurt, it is much more likely to help journalists. It’s going to continue to grow and develop. Those who refuse to accept it will fall behind or always feel it nipping at their heels. They might as well just join the club now.

Blurring ethical lines

2007-02-23T19:37:00.000-06:00

It was my first day as a reporter and I was sitting in the Missouri Senate in my newly purchased suit thinking I was one of the cool kids. I got to sit at the reporters’ table, right between the Associated Press and Post-Dispatch reporters. A senator took the floor to welcome his next- door neighbor, a cute little girl in a black dress with bright red hair, as the page girl for the day. As she bounced onto the floor she waved and everyone began to clap for the young girl, or so I thought. I joined in with the applause and then realized I was the only reporter clapping. “We don’t clap for anyone,” my editor whispered behind me. Embarrassed, I stopped. But then I began to think: was I really being unethical by showing a political bias by clapping for the seven-year-old girl? I don’t think so.

Journalists will face much more ethical decisions throughout their career. Ethics is the heart of journalism, and credibility is the main ingredient to a successful reporter. Technology has and will continue to change journalism. And as technology continues to develop, so will the ethical dilemmas and choices that journalists will confront.

The advancement of technology blurs the line of what is considered ethical in journalism. Sometimes technology helps and improves news stories, and other times it compromises coverage. Technology has changed how people want their news, and quickness often trumps accuracy. It takes time to verify spelling of names, exactness of statistics, and make sure proper style and grammar is used. Editors become so wrapped up in being “first” they overlook problem spots in a story, or don’t ask the ever-important question: “How do you know this?” This is where mistakes come in, and mistakes lead to lose of credibility. Sending breaking news quickly to people’s cell phones, e-mails and Blackberries, should not be a goal. The goal should be sending breaking news accurately.

Technology has also made reporters less aggressive with their stories. Why attend a boring five-hour long committee meeting when you know the minutes will be available immediately after the meeting online? Reporting is about being in the field, witnessing what’s happening, meeting victims and telling a story. Not sitting behind a desk, relying on what others tell you. Jason Leopold hit the nail on the head when he told new reporters the importance of cultivating sources. “You guys need to go out our and start cultivating sources. Everyone knows what that means right? You need to befriend the cashier at the grocery store, the cops, they guy at the newsstand. Those are the people who are going to tip you off” (143). Too often reporters will search online for a discussion group or social network on a specific topic to locate sources instead of cultivating relationships. Often people found online will have a hidden agenda, and not provide accurate information.

Technology can also help journalists too. The Internet can provide a quick means to help verify certain facts, the spelling of a name or the correct address for the restaurant that burned down. The plethora of professional research available online also helps reporters become quick experts on a topic, which will help increase the thoroughness of the story. Technology can help improve accuracy. It allows a reporter to double, triple check facts.

We’ve all done it. After working on a big story reporters compare their story to what other news outlets put out. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with comparing your story to what other reporters produced. It helps budding reporters develop into a more solid reporter by finding holes in their story, seeing different angles and approaches used, and what sources others cited. But it becomes unethical to take information that other reporters worked to gather and use it in your story. Everyone tries to be first with breaking a story, but most of the time someone will beat you to it. So is the information that they worked to dig up fair game for you to use, even if you verify it yourself?

In the newsroom where I worked this summer there was one editor who on a weekly basis would tell a reporter, “if they’re dumb enough to put it on the Internet, you can use it to your advantage.” He was referring to the home or spouses work number of a source a reporter was trying to get in contact with. The Internet gives us almost immediate access to personal information that many people are not even aware exists. The ability to Google a person, or mapquest a location helps, but how far is too far? What if you stumble across a chatroom or discussion board bashing one of your sources, do you use the information?

Reporters have to be careful with how they obtain and use information. As ethical standards fall in other professions and industries, journalists have the obligation to maintain high ethical standards.

Let's not sacrifice accuracy

2007-02-23T19:24:00.000-06:00

It used to only be the mission of television stations to be the first station to break news. When we talk in class about whether or not to go with accuracy or speed, my first instinct is to still think of TV stations, not newspapers.

But with the emergence of the Internet, it’s an issue newspaper companies must address now too. Nearly every newspaper has a Web site. But the problem arises with the newspaper business’ relative inexperience in dealing with breaking news. TV has had the objective of rushing news onto the air since it’s been around. Newspapers, on the other hand, haven’t had much time to adjust to the fact that their Web sites are now breaking news outlets as well.

Some people hear of breaking news but don’t have the opportunity to turn on a TV. Take students at Missouri, for example. Just a week or two ago I was in class and didn’t have the opportunity to turn on a TV to check the updates on a breaking news situation in Kansas City. So my first instinct was to have a friend check the Star’s Web site to see if it had any information on the situation, which it did.

Newspapers are quickly rushing breaking news to Web sites. But you have to wonder what’s lost in the process. There’s no time to fact check an article, yet still be the first outlet to present the news on your Web site. So accuracy is what gets left behind.

I noticed this in a recent case here in Columbia. When Mike Anderson Jr. of the Missouri basketball team was arrested for a DWI, the Kansas City Star posted the news on its Web site the next day. It was the first outlet to report the information that I saw. I’m sure the Star thinks its credibility improves because it was first to report the news. But when reading the article, I thought less of the publication. I was disappointed to see how many errors the story included, both grammar and factual.

I was at the Missourian when we reported the breaking news about Anderson Jr. on our on Web site. The first thing I heard when we finished the article was a comment about us being 40 minutes behind the Star. Ignored was the fact that our story included much more in-depth coverage about the situation.

But I also questioned our method of putting the story onto the Web site. We skipped over the copy desk, as to make sure our story was up on the site faster. It wasn’t until after the story was posted that I noticed a couple rather small factual errors in the story, which we later changed. While these particular errors were not unethical, rushing a story and choosing time over accuracy always allows for the possibility of having something important wrong with an article.

While growing up, I always looked at newspapers as the most credible media outlet. I figured they had the most time to get everything right. They had the time to check the facts in articles and to present all the information correctly. There were more people reading an article to ensure of its minimal mistakes. The Internet, unfortunately, has somewhat changed my opinion. Errors in a story on the Kansas City Star’s Web site affects much more than just the site. It affects my view of the entire publication.

Technology affects all media outlets. But the problem with newspapers is it might take awhile for them to learn how to become a breaking news publication. In my opinion, the most important thing is that they are careful not to hurt their credibility in the process of trying to be first. Accuracy needs to be chosen instead.

Sam

Cutting Corners

2007-02-23T19:19:00.000-06:00

Saturday afternoon I was sitting in front of the computer at the Missourian sports desk. It was around 3 or 4 and I had been in the newsroom since 11 that morning. Earlier that afternoon, I had finished writing a feature story on swimmer Micheal Phelps. I still had another story to finish writing before I could leave, and I really wanted to leave the newsroom by around 5. I wasn’t covering the Missouri Grand Prix, where Phelps was competing that night, for the paper. But, I had been researching the event and talking to swimmers all week, and I felt somewhat attached to it. I wanted to go just to watch, as an interested spectator, not a journalist. I was frustrated as I searched the internet for biographies on Phelps. We wanted to run a graphic listing Phelps’ gold medals in the 2004 Olympics with the days they were won, what events, the winning times, etc. When I was researching my story, I found a bio on Phelps on the official website for USA Swimming. I wrote down much of the info we wanted for the graphic, but didn’t have all of it. The problem was, the bio section of the USA Swimming website was down that day. As I searched for the info I came across Phelps’ bio on Wikipedia. It had a chart of the six gold medal wins in 2004 with all the info we wanted. It matched all the info I had gotten earlier, and I was pretty certain that it was all correct. But, still, it was Wikipedia. Needing an official source, I spent quite awhile reading biographies and coming up empty. Finally, I found a list of all Olympic winners in 2004 from the official Olympics website, browsed through for the events Phelps won, and sent it on to the graphics department. I didn’t get out of the newsroom until 6 that day. I missed the swimming events, and Phelps broke a world record, I was disappointed that I missed it, but at least we ran a graphic sure that we had the accurate information.

I bring this up because I think it demonstrates how easy it is to use technology to cut corners these days. If I had been a huge swimming fan and was determined not to miss the competition that night, I may have simply relied on the information from Wikipedia. After all, I was pretty sure it was correct. There’s a dangerous line for journalists when it comes to information we get from the internet, and it’s pretty easy to cross it if it will save us some time in the newsroom. If we find something on a website that may not be reliable, but it sounds right, it’s easy to just trust it, plug it into our stories, and leave.

It’s scary to think that I could go into Wikipedia, throw in some false information, and some fellow writer could come across it before it’s edited out, take it as fact, and include it in a story. The abundance of information sources out there makes our lives as journalists a lot easier, for sure, but it also makes cutting corners way too easy. Thus, one of the most important tasks for journalists today is to not be lazy, to not cut corners just because we can, to spend the extra time to validate facts and information. After all, even if we do have to spend a little bit of extra time fact-checking, we still have it easy compared to the journalists who came before us. A writer writing a similar story on Mark Spitz’s 7 gold medals in 1972 wouldn’t have had the internet to find the information the way I found it. They wouldn’t have been able to find the background info prior to an interview which helped me ask the right questions to get the right answers that led to a good feature story. I can’t even imagine a newspaper running smoothly without the internet. Obviously, there had to be other places to get facts before the internet, or newspapers wouldn’t have existed. But, I’m sure it took a lot longer to make phone calls in order to fact-check every little detail about a person or an event.

It’s great not to have to spend as much time researching these days. It allows us more time to get out of the newsroom, to find interesting stories and interesting people. It gives us more of an opportunity to focus on our writing and our storytelling abilities. Simply put, it allows for us to write more stories, and to write better stories. Just don’t trust Wikipedia.

When is quick too quick?

2007-02-23T19:13:00.000-06:00

I'll always remember something my now-late grandfather told me when I used my cell phone at family get-togethers. No, it wasn't "Who gets more money: The girl or the phone company?" or "What, looking for love?" Instead, he asked a simple question — "Isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier?"

Well, it does, I would always reply.

"Then why does it seem those things usually (foul) things up for everybody?"

I never was able to give my grandfather a satisfactory answer. He died two years ago next month but his question about me and my old brick of a cell phone is applicable to ethics. It seems that the more technology people have, the easier it is for people to (foul) things up. But, it is also easier for people to fix when they have (fouled) up.

A good example of this is something I experienced exactly a week ago. It was around 4:30 in the afternoon and everybody that I knew was eager to start their weekend. Unfortunately for those on the cops and courts beat and the MU men's basketball beat, Mike Anderson Jr. had to go and get arrested for DWI the night before. This meant, at least I felt, a lot of extra work and time so the Missourian could have an online-only story, probably one that few would read.

So, after requesting and obtaining a phantom press release from the MU athletics department, my co-writer and I sat down with an editor at the Missourian to get this little piece of news online. The editor read through it a couple times, shifted a comma and so forth, and got it put online. I thought it was a job well done for me and my new, one-time writing partner. We got some news, got confirmation, and put it online.

The story we put online, however, wasn't exactly correct. The main facts weren't wrong, but there were some errors that, at least to me, were glaring.

Either a detail about the crime was wrong, or somewhat embarrassingly for me personally, a stat about Anderson. Being the perfectionists we are at the old MIssourian, my writing partner and I kept making changes to the online story. While we making the story as factually correct as possible, we didn't note anywhere that we continued to alter the story while it was online. There was no "This story has been corrected" tag at the bottom or anywhere else.

And I feel, there should have been.

Let's say you're Mr. Henry Rowengartner of Columbia and you look to DIGMO.com for breaking news about your home city. You see that Mike Anderson Jr. has been busted for a DWI but you read the first version only. That version, it turns out, was not fundamentally wrong but had one or two minor problems. If you're Mr. Rowengartner, wouldn't you like to be able to go back to DIGMO and see that the version of the story you read was not entirely correct? Or at least check for updates and see that the old version was wrong?

In short, by just fixing the errors without telling anybody on the website, it feels like the Missourian is just covering up its mistakes. While that won't lead to Nixonian type troubles for the Missourian, it does set a bad precedent. It's a precedent that says, "Yeah, we can screw up online but we can just fix it and nobody will tell anybody and we'll just pretend we're the perfect little daily we aren't even close to being." Or something like that.

If I remember my J1100 lectures correctly, and there's a chance I don't, isn't something mentioned about the credibility of the news industry? If there was something mentioned, I believe the point of the lecture would be for the journalist and paper in question to try its hardest to be factually correct. And if it isn't, then shouldn't the institution making the error say that it was wrong?

I don't think that going on-line has made this less important. It does make this more difficult, though.

When we were writing this article, that turned out to be less than 5 inches, we kept being told by our editor that we wanted to keep up with the Trib. That meant we were in a rush we wouldn't have been in the past. In the past, we would have been able to just take our time, proof the thing a little closer, and put it in the paper the next day. That era, though, is gone. Now, it's all about speed. And accuracy can't be forgotten.

The real conflict I see with ethics and journalism comes with that desire for speed. When one paper gets anything before its competition, it just seems like it will put it online without checking the accuracy or even the newsworthiness. And this is dangerous for the public, especially when they depend on us to tell them what is going on. If two papers have conflicting stories, that hurts the public more than the eventual loser paper. In short, technology has made everything in journalism a race. And unless you are a perfect reporter with perfect methods and ability, you will eventually screw up when against the clock.

Then, it's up to the newspaper to tell people you've screwed up. If we're not going to get it right, that's probably the least we can do. And when we do (foul) things up, we have to tell people.

To be first or to be accurate?

2007-02-23T19:07:00.000-06:00

Be first.

It was just this week I was reminded of the importance of that factor when it comes to reporting news. The Missourian would not run a story on the front page because our competition, the Columbia Daily Tribune had printed the story the previous day and we were late. We were last, which isn't where you want to be journalistically. The news is old - no one will want to read it.

Technology now provides journalists with an easy way to be first - to break a story - and in consequence to be deemed the best because of it. And as technology improves and grows, we're always looking for a better way to get news to people even quicker.

Getting your news by a text message on your cell phone is a common occurrence in today's technologically-savvy world. With most people carrying their cell phones with them everywhere they go, you're guaranteed an easy way to get the news to your audience before that person may even see the story on the Web.

Jason Leopold wrote about his desire to be the first to break news and how it literally became an addicition for him. But in the process he often got important things wrong in his story. In the talk we had with him in class he talked about how he had learned from those mistakes and how he now views accuracy in his stories to be more important than to get his byline on a breaking news story.

I do most of my work at the paper as a designer and copy editor. My job is to prevent inaccuracies from getting into the newspaper. The editing desk takes on the responsibility as the last line of defense for a publication's credibility. When it comes to online content, those levels of prevention are often thrown out the window in an attempt to post first.

An example of this also presented itself at the Missourian this past week. We had a story about how Columbia-based First National Bank & Trust had announced some major shifts in upper management with its increasing growth. We posted the story online immediately and then one of our student teaching assistants printed it off to edit it.

In an article on poynter.org about online ethics, it says, "In its highest form, journalism is the dissemination of accurate information...that puts service to the reader and the common good above any special interest or economic, political or philosophical agenda...such credibility will likely give journalism its enduring value in society." The article is all about guidelines for online journalists that were developed at a conference the Institute held last year to address issues and dilemmas special to the world of technology and journalism.

One of the topics was when to edit and when to get rid of gatekeepers for a story that needs immediacy. Just like the story for ColumbiaMissourian.com on the bank management, it was important to get it up on the Web as soon as possible, but the paper also took a big risk with its credibility by not editing the story before posting it. It's not necessarily a risk that should never be taken - TV stations take those risks often with live broadcasts.

Those at the Poynter conference discussed lots of topics, but one was about how to deal with corrections to news stories. There obviously is no easy way to track who is reading your content and find out at what exact time they might have read it. So if you post a breaking news story it is more than likely that the reader will take a quick glance at it and not think of it again, because they'll feel like they got what they needed out of the story. But if there is something wrong in the story and you go back later to make the correction there is no way to make sure that those who have already read the news get the correction they need.

You're providing a disservice to your audience anytime you blindly go into breaking news with technology. They might have inaccurate information and not even realize it, or if they do find out later that it's wrong, they'll lose that all important respect for your publication's credibility.

While I've identified a lot of the harms that technology can present to sticking to journalistic ethics, there are times that it can be beneficial to other ethical matters, such as being transparent. Online journalism provides the opportunity to show a lot of layers of journalism.

One instance is a series of articles that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran last month. Their online content was much more thorough than what was in the print version though and they used technology to their advantage by providing multimedia slide shows, blog entries, personal points of view from the reporter and readers, and links to sources they used. An important ethical issue that could have been lost had the newspaper not done it correctly, is labeling and explaining how each of those sections differ from traditional journalism. It was very transparent and it provided a forum for thought that a print version could not have provided.

Poynter's conference identified a set of principles and values that journalists should follow and that they "believe these ethical principles apply to all content, regardless of whether it's text, photos, audio, video, etc., and whether it's on the web, on a blog, in print, on broadcast, or delivered via email, podcasts or beyond."

Rules for journalists using technology are very fluid as of now, but as more awareness is being raised with things like Poynter's conference, we can only hope more online journalists will take those basic journalistic ethical principles into account before using technology for a different agenda than serving their readers with accurate, important and useful news.

Tech troubles

2007-02-23T18:04:00.000-06:00

As technology continues to improve and become more prevalent, it will undoubtedly become further ingrained in the way that journalists operate. Similarly, it will likely change how we think about journalism as a whole. As was seen in Jason Leopold’s account of the reporting he did in “News Junkie,” technology can be either incredibly helpful, or incredibly damning. When it was working for him, technology helped Leopold get electronic copies of forms and turn stories faster. He scooped the bigger fish. He won awards. He didn’t have to snort so much coke. Not much later, however, an e-mail with no source and no verification ruined his career. He lost his credibility. He lost his job. He took shots from numerous news outlets. I bet that made him want an eight ball real bad.

Jason Leopold certainly was not the first, and definitely won’t be the last, person to be both helped and harmed by technology. What’s yet to be seen is whether this increased access is ultimately better or worse for journalism and, more importantly, how it changes the ethics landscape. I think that technology is a great thing for journalism. Sure, Joe Sixpack might scoop me one day because he’s caught something on his video phone, but ultimately, more participants in journalism — and more eyes on journalists — will improve the trade. Even the watchdogs need a watchdog from time to time.

For instance, in this new age of technology, blogging is becoming an increasingly more important news medium. There are arguments that it shouldn’t be considered journalism because of the multitude of crap that floats around the internet. However, I would argue that the vast majority of people that frequent blog sites know the difference between a pure breed and a mut — they know the layout and the language of the internet and will not fall prey (as easily) to fake sites. That being said, reporters who blog must face an international audience that is capable of commenting on every word that it written. This allows for a much stronger check on power than the readership of a traditional news medium because the conversation is more open. Never before has a reporter been as available for criticism than with blogging — it makes transparency a much larger issue.

Outside of the blogosphere (which is a word I love, along with globesity a,k,a, the global obesity epidemic), technology has improved fact checking and possible source lists. You don’t need to get the government on the horn, or the census bureau, to get some facts, they’re available through the organization’s Web sites now. Additionally, news can be updated continuously, creating greater opportunities for in-depth reporting. So, when 9/11 hit, the news the next day wasn’t that it happened, by why it happened, who did it, etc. Technology has allowed for journalists to keep the public more informed.

These improvements do, admittedly, have a darker side. I know I am very dependent on spell check, something that can come back to haunt you (see public v. pubic if you don’t believe me). Furthermore, the sites that are often used for fact-checking can be wrong — places like Wikipedia contain a plethora of errors and inaccuracies and cannot be relied upon for a news source. With up-to-the-minute reporting also comes at-the-last-minute editing, in which editors and copy editors alike are unable to get ample time to look for inaccuracies, inconsistencies or even libelous content. Additionally, documents can be doctored or fabricated entirely. Sources with any sort of experience on programs like Photoshop can alter pictures to fool news agencies, whose excitement at a breaking story can lead to publishing a falsity. Fake blogs are created by public relations companies to create favorable news for their clients. All of these “improvements” in technology make it that much easier for a journalist to step on a metaphorical landmine. However, that in itself should ultimately lead journalism down a trail of stronger ethics. People who cut corners seem to get caught. Unethical reporters like Jason Leopold or Jayson Blair got caught and it seems likely others will too. In the end, the news organizations with the strongest reputations and strongest reporting will be comprised on journalists with the strongest ethics — or at the very least the journalists who are too scared to act unethically.

After all, if journalists don’t shape up and start acting better, robot journalists will eventually take our spots. And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have a robot as a butler than a reporter. Think about it.

The e-journalist

2007-02-23T17:30:00.000-06:00

As news sources around the country work to keep up with the changing e-landscape, few organizations have had the time to revise what are now outdated ethical standards.

This can be seen in the contradictory stance journalism has taken on blogs and personal profiles. While journalists and journalism students around the country are encouraged or even required to be available electronically, the fine line between availability and too much information has wavered. For example, recently the Missourian’s own Tom Warhover sent out an e-mail to Missourian staff and students prohibiting political or organizational ties to be published on Facebook profiles, a popular social network for college students. The Facebook has been a growing student venue for almost two years now, but the conflict only just came to light (and thanks to a reporting student no less).

Blogs are even more nebulous, mostly because they encompass not only mainstream journalists but also “citizen journalism.” First things first, the publications have been able to deal with their own staffs, even if the decisions vary among organizations. Some journalists are prohibited from blogs altogether; others can have them only if they don’t identify their profession or discuss their work. Still more are completely open to the commentary found on reporters’ electronic counterparts.

As far as citizen journalism on blogs, there is less consensus on what should be counted as true journalism. During the group discussions in class, the main concern with bloggers as journalists was the absence of an editorial process and staff. Before publication in a paper, broadcast, textcast or posting online, a story must be vetted through an editorial process and checked over for factual and grammatical errors. While this process is not foolproof, it does prevent a lot of mistakes. There is no such editorial standard for bloggers who claim to be journalists.

Such blogs are not only in danger of writers’ biases and anonymity, but also of their psychology. “Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-mail Misbehavior,” a New York Times article by Daniel Goleman, argues that people are more likely to say offensive or rude things over the Internet than they are in person because they miss out on the emotional cues in a face-to-face conversation that typically cause empathy. This lack of inhibition can cause unnecessary misunderstanding and offense. In an e-mail to Missourian editors dated February 23, Pulitzer Prize winner Jacqi Banaszynski notes that the tendency for people to write offensive or rude material on the Internet may affect this journalism blogs as well: “Clearly this isn’t a strictly apples-to-apples comparison. But I do think it will be worth watching the “raw” coverage that is encouraged on online sites to see how much of it becomes the journalistic version of offensive and rude.”

On top of the conceptual questions behind traditional versus new journalism, there are shining examples like Jason Leopold. After an arguably too-long stint in mainstream journalism, the ethically flexible reporter now freelances for various independent journalism sites. In this particular case, the reporter has claimed to tighten his ethical standards. (Leopold, in-class message) However, that may be a slippery slope, and without the barrier and gatekeepers of mainstream journalism, credibility may be called into question.

Journalistic ethics should provide an anchor, a standard that holds journalism to its values. As journalists and the general population continue to be rocked by technological waves, they need not forget to lengthen the ethical chain.

Is laziness unethical?

2007-02-23T17:09:00.000-06:00

Unethical journalists have always existed and they always will. In every fast-paced, money-driven, and cutthroat industry there will always be cheaters. (See steroids in baseball).

And just like baseball, the “cheaters” have evolved at the same rapid pace as technology. Technology has made unethical behavior easier. But, does that mean it’s more prevalent?

I don’t think so.

There are journalists who want to do it the right way and there are those who just want to get ahead at any price. While technology creates an ever-increasing temptation to cut corners, well-trained journalists will not waiver. Maybe that’s just the Cubs optimism in me leaking out.

Every reporter wants to break the big story. Jason Leopold, in his book “News Junkie,” revealed his lies, shortcuts, and manipulation that led him to the forefront of the California energy crisis. But, he eventually got caught, just like Jason Blair. Then there was Dan Rather in 2004. He (knowingly/unknowingly) used forged military documents in a CBS news story that attacked President Bush’s (lack of) military service.

But as in all these cases, technology was a double-edged sword. Computers can forge documents, and the Internet can give you background on locations even if you aren’t really there. But, in the end technology was a major reason why they were caught.

I believe the biggest problem with technology isn’t necessarily the increase of unethical behavior. I believe it promotes laziness.

Bob Steele, director of journalism ethics programs for the Poynter Institute said, “…Computers are changing the news-gathering process. Turning to online sources for information or using computers to analyze information has become almost as commonplace as dropping in on city hall. And, with the increased use of different newsgathering methodology, editors might face new ethical challenges, or at least, new twists on old problems.”

This isn’t making up sources, forging documents, or lying to sources. This is just pure laziness. The best reporting is done outside of the newsroom. But, it requires lots of legwork and creativity.

Bob Steele continued by adding two crucial findings about technology’s affect on the media. I suspect these points are more at the heart of resolving the debate concerning techonology and ethics.

First he said, “So far, there have been relatively few reported instances of ethical problems associated with computer-assisted journalism.”

Later he said, “One of the most common forms of technology misuse has been in the arena of photojournalism. Several publications have been caught in computer photo manipulations.”

So, where do we stand?

I believe we are in the same place as before the technology boom. I have used Google and Wikipedia to find sources or to find background information. But, then I called sources, met with those involved, and attended meetings. Technology can just as easily supplement quality journalism as it could promote unethical behavior.

ethical obligation to democratic society

2007-02-23T17:01:00.000-06:00

Last semester, when working the copydesk during the night of the elections, I remember the newsroom buzzing about the break up of Brittney and K-Fed. All day I was anxious to hear the results of the election and hear which party had seized control in congress. For others, however, election news during most of the day was over-shadowed by news of this Hollywood breakup. When staff members in The Missourian asked me if I had heard about the ground-breaking split, my response was, “Why should I care?”

Technology’s most significant negative impact on news is the change in what is considered “news.” Technology has become the news hub for the younger generation of readers. This has caused reporters and editors to focus on a different form of news in order to attract more readers. The current news priorities are music, local, current events, international, national and politics, respectively. In addition, there has been an increased emphasis on celebrity gossip being passed off as news. Our society has been infiltrated by new technologies, so much that most people have become dependant on television, internet and their MP3 players.

Journalism plays a unique role in democratic societies. In order to make educated decisions concerning elections and different legislative policies, voters need information about local, national and international events. Journalism is the manner in which this information can be widely dispersed. However the current media’s attention has been redirected to a daily analysis of Hollywood. By the increased coverage of celebrities, the media is affirming that pop culture news is more important than local, national and international current events and political news. Celebrity news, however, does not contribute to the helping voters create a political consciousness.

The internet still offers a wide-array of information on politics and foreign affairs, though sometimes placed in a position subordinate to Brittney’s breakup. However even with the hard news provided, the news websites are only abbreviated versions of the print and television versions, Gans explains.

“In fact, the internet provides the most abbreviated news in all the news media, which may help explain why many young people, who are traditionally the least interested in the news, are getting most of their news from the web.”

When reporters fold to the market’s demands, in the manner of elevating news of music and celebrities above traditional news, they are failing in their role to serve their democratic society. Journalists need to be continually cognizant of their role in society. Editors are able to dictate what people think about by their choice of what to report and the choice of placement of different stories.

Journalists have an important ethical responsibility. Readers are always able to find news concerning just about any topic they want, however with the growing prominence of celebrity news the readers have to dig deeper to find the news that actually matters to their lives. Brittney’s breakup has no effect on the average reader’s life, however new immigration policies has an effect on the immigrants, small businesses, agriculture, prices of commodities, etc…

And, as Gans pointed out, the younger readers of internet news – which the celebrity gossip is appealing to – has a limited attention span for news. Therefore it is unlikely that these readers will set out to search for traditional news, the form that matters to their everyday lives.

So with technology pervading every aspect of society, celebrities are rising in the ranks and becoming more dominant figures. But where does journalism draw the line between reporting on celebrity news – which the market might demand – and traditional news of current events and politics which is pertinent to a democratic society?

Ethics and Technology

2007-02-23T16:51:00.000-06:00

I haven’t had my computer for 7 days.

It’s been very difficult. I kind of feel lost. I know you’re probably already rolling your eyes because this sounds pathetic (and I agree it kind of is), but this inconvenience couldn’t have come at a better time because as I was thinking about this essay, I’ve realized how important technology really is. Usually (when my computer is not locked up in the MacExperts store) I check my student email probably about 20 times a day- not to mention my Gmail account, Facebook, Bank of America account, and a series of newspapers’ websites- while also being signed on to AOL instant messenger for most of the day. If you couldn’t tell, I can’t live without my computer.

And my cell phone isn’t any different. I truly don’t leave home without it. It’s the first thing I check when I get out of class (if I haven’t already during class), when I am leaving the gym, when I’m walking out of my house, and when I wake up in the morning.

I really cannot understand how people used to live without technologies such as a cell phone or the Internet. But what I really cannot comprehend is how a newsroom operated without these types of technology. Already in my journalism career, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used my cell phone to call a source on a way to an interview, call to check in with my editor, or call the copydesk to change a fact in my story. Google is my best friend when fact checking for name, addresses, and phone numbers. Online dictionaries and thesauruses are my saving grace when I’m sitting on the copydesk. And who are we kidding? The Missourian couldn’t even be published without the Internet since we electronically send the paper to the publishing plant in Jefferson City.

Technology allows journalists to catch plagiarism more easily (while also tempting plagiarism at the same time). It gives us (meaning journalists) a world of easily assessable data to add to stories and lets us crunch that data at a high level. It connects us with sources around the world and creates a Web community for journalists to draw from. It lets us find out what other media outlets are doing (either in celebration that we’ve beaten our competitors on a story or in disappointment that we’ve been scooped). It allows us to file easily from remote locations and send our work out far and wide.

On the other hand (there’s always another hand), it can hamper with journalists’ ethical ability. It (like I already noted) invites temptation to plagiarize, especially in such a fast paced competitive news world. It encourages reliance on wire copy and electronic sources. It encourages lax fact checking from places like Google or Wikipedia. And it keeps us from getting out of our chairs and actually leaving the newsroom to report the story.

It’s almost mind boggling to think about how many journalists rely on Wikipedia for factual information. While it on some occasions can serve as a SMALL stepping stone, it is by no means a source. If you were writing a thesis and submitted your paper with Wikipedia as a source, you would get laughed out of the room while trying to do your defense. So why do so many journalists use it as a source for newspapers?

The best advice I’ve ever been given (for the purpose of journalism) is to get off my butt and leave the newsroom to find the best stories. While technology vastly improves our ability to get the story out quick and fact check efficiently, there is no question that you will get a better story if you actually leave the newsroom than if you stay sitting at your desk. In the age where technology is at our fingertips, we still need original and creative reporting- neither of which will come from staring at a computer screen.

So to answer the question- does technology harm or improve our ability to be ethical journalists- it does both.

Ethics and Technology

2007-02-23T15:30:00.000-06:00

I believe that technology both hurts and harms our ability to be ethical journalists. We can use technology to look up almost anything we want to in an instant, rather than being forced to go to a library or spend valuable time looking up facts and figures. This helps our ethics because it big situations where we need to make calculated ethical decisions, technology allows us to spend more time weighing the ethics of a certain decision.
Technology can also help our ethics because we can talk with almost anyone in the world who has the capable technology. This can allow us to bring a lot of people into the conversation to help us make ethical decisions.
Poynter recently held a conference on ethics in online journalism. Here is one of the things they concluded:
“Journalists should accept the challenge and embrace the opportunity to build new business models that will flourish in an era of digital media. Journalism's highest values can endure only if they stand on a sound economic foundation. It is essential that the journalists who adhere to those values be proactive -- not just reactive -- participants in the process of innovation.”
But technology can also hurt our ethics in multiple ways. As discussed in class, Jayson Blair’s reporting on Private Jessica Lynch’s family looking out over tobacco fields was blatantly false and it almost skipped by everyone. In fact, the false information wasn’t even checked at the newspaper. Blair was obviously a very smart, if very unethical newspaper reporter. He even fooled the rest of the newspaper by saying he was actually in Lynch’s hometown when he wasn’t even close. Instead, he committed a huge breach of ethics by reporting on what he saw on television and then sprinkling in his own lies.
What’s important to remember and what’s pertinent to this discussion, is that Blair was allowed to use technology to help make an unethical decision. It allowed him, and gave him the temptation, to skirt the basic rules of journalism. Technology harmed Blair’s ability to be an ethical journalist and gave him the easy way out of what could have been a good story.
There’s also the issue of Wikipedia. As with any class, it allows for a lot of room for error in our ethics as journalists. Wikipedia is easy, informative and incredibly convenient. However, it’s not always filled with accurate information with whatever article you’re looking at. It can be tough to verify some of the information that’s in there. It can allow journalists to make unethical decisions easily.
Technology can help us become ethical journalists with its ease and volume of usable information. But it can hurt if that information is false.
--John Sahly

Who draws the line?

2007-02-23T14:29:00.000-06:00

I met a good-looking guy on the shuttle bus once, and after a delightful conversation, I spontaneously gave him my phone number. Within five minutes of walking through the door into my apartment, equipped with only his first name, his major and his class year, I found the boy on Facebook. Within seconds, I learned our music tastes matched, I had looked at every posted photo and even knew his brother’s name.

If that’s not creepy, I don’t know what is.

The boy confided later that he had done the same thing for me when he got home that night. Only my name is a unique occurrence under the Missouri Facebook network and is therefore much easier to find than a random “Brad*” (*name changed to protect the innocent).

Was this a necessary thing for me to do? Of course. I actually answered my phone when he called, because based on the things I learned from his profile, I quickly deduced I would make it home from a date in one piece and with my integrity intact.

I can’t live without the Internet. I check my e-mail at least 20 times a day. I’m usually connected to an instant messenger. I routinely check a few message boards, update my fantasy racing team and scan for classmates’ bylines. Don’t get me started about my Facebook use.

But I mostly use the Internet for good, and not evil or amusement. I think I’ve memorized the Web address for every Big 12 Conference athletic program, and frequently use the information on those sites.

In my short life, I can’t imagine successfully producing a newspaper, magazine or television news broadcast without the help of the Internet. I know it was done. But I just cannot comprehend how.

The Internet is a copy editor’s dream. How else would I have ever figured out that the name of Red Schoendienst, a former St. Louis Cardinal and Hall of Famer, was misspelled? Thanks, Google.

Reporters use it. Designers use it. Photographers use it. Editors live on it.

The Internet can cause problems, though. I can make a Web site, post doctored photos with the head of my roommate on the body of a cat and it will make it into the National Enquirer the next day. The Internet in no way discriminates its content.

As an information graphics designer, you become utterly fluent in whatever information you are trying to display. Sometimes the reporter helps you out with official sources, both Web related and not. Other times, it’s all up to you.

As you are digging into information about the science of teeth whitening, you will quickly realize there isn’t much information on the health and safety of the process, and especially no visual information regarding the actual microscopic chemical process. What you will find, thanks to the mighty search engines, is a Web site that looks authentic. It smells authentic. In fine print, you see that the supposed scientific article you are viewing has been sponsored by Crest. So much for authenticity and objectivity.

Under Wikipedia, as you are background surfing, you find the same article. The American Dental Society Web site includes a link to the biased article. Another organization, which claims to be objective and is seemingly trustworthy, has the same article and is pawning it off as its own original information.

It’s your final graphics project and it’s worth a good chunk of your grade. What do you do?

You half-ass it, accept your C, and bury the detested document deep within a folder on the server, never again to be seen on screen and especially not in print.

For a graphics designer, you can find information on any topic you want. But it’s up to you to determine if it’s the most accurate and fair information you can find. For some graphics, you find and combine information from nearly a dozen sites. You source them in a credit line, but is that enough? Did you get it right?

A lot of times in graphics, it’s easier to publish a photo and use it as your main image instead of illustrating a complex thing. Use a Google image search for “morel mushroom” and you get nearly 2,000 results. Can you just klep an image off one of those sites and then add the site to your source line? Do you have to go through the trouble of e-mailing the Web master, only to find out that they stole the image from another site?

I was working on a sports graphic, detailing MU’s chances of making it to one of several bowl games. I went to each bowl’s Web site to find a representative icon of the bowl. Some sites had prepared media kits so I could download high-resolution jpegs. Others had no disclaimer. One site forbade the publication of the icon without prior permission. When the information officer does not e-mail you back giving you permission, what do you do?

I snagged the image from the home page and stuck it on my graphic along with eight others that I may or may not have had express permission to reproduce. Is this an ethical quandary? I don’t even yet know. All I know is that the Missourian hasn’t been sued yet and things are looking good for that not to happen.

In writing even, there is that gray area where you don’t know whether to source general knowledge or even when an item can be considered general knowledge. If a fact appears repeatedly in Google’s top 20 results, does that mean the entire public should know about it?

These aren’t conversations people would be having as they scurried to put a newspaper together 15 years ago. These little things probably aren’t even real, bona fide ethical issues. The Internet opens the door for easy plagiarism, which is 10 times more questionable than publishing a bowl game icon in a non-threatening way.

Then there’s always that sneaky, ethical issue of privacy. A good portion of what’s on the Web is user-generated and therefore has the permission of the subject, him- or herself, before it goes worldwide. Professors at MU often have professional Web sites that link directly to personal sites that publish photos of them on vacation with their families and friends. Go a step further and google (and this is verb form of the proper noun which has become vernacular) some of those names found on the site. The digging here is endless.

And then it all comes back to Facebook. Am I supposed to be checking in on the MU women’s basketball players and browsing their photo galleries for infractions? Can I fact- check a source using the networking site?

I don’t know. I’ve done both.

I do know that Facebook stalking does not guarantee success in finding a mate. Nor does giving your phone number to a random fellow on a bus. Web profiles and campus transportation do not always produce good prospects.

Technological temptation

2007-02-23T13:04:00.000-06:00

Technology tempts us. It’s the candy dish that never gets depleted. It’s there for us whenever we want it. But too much sugar can be a bad thing. And it’s the same with technology – the laziness it can induce goes right to the thighs.
Availability of information makes it easier for ethical journalists to ensure accuracy. But it also makes it easier for the unethical to deceive. Do a Google search for “ethics,” and what do you get? The top result is Wikipedia, a Web site that can be edited by anyone, shaped into whatever form the public deems to be truthful and/or ethical. Ironic, isn’t it?
Technology enables us to do with it whatever we like. It can be easy to use it ethically if we have the right intentions and differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources. Technology also needs to be used ethically.
People feel the need to be constantly interconnected and informed. This is good news for media. Online updates and text casting are hugely beneficial for media consumption. The utilization of these technological tools can turn newspapers into a preferred medium. Paper publications won’t be regarded as much as “yesterday’s news” when they can keep people up to date with proper use of technology.
Most of the public thinks newspapers are a "backward" medium that is lagging behind. Public consumption of news via forms of technology requires the understanding that text casts and online updates are not the whole story. If this isn't made clear, it's not ethical because audiences aren't receiving the whole truth. Technology should be used to tell audiences they should look further.
As a copy editor, I love the Internet. LOVE IT. I've saved the paper and reporters great embarrassment many times by using the Internet, my catch-all research tool.
I’ve double-checked Donald Rumsfeld’s middle name against a government Web site when a Washington Post letter had “Donald H. Rumsfeld.” His middle initial is “M,” by the way.
I’ve read “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” and gone to the humanitarian gazillionaire’s Web site to see the “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”
Want to know the proper spelling of a medical term not covered by Merriam-Webster? Try the American Medical Association’s Web site. And while you’re there, look up a few peer-reviewed articles that make reference to the term and find out if that Dr. So-and-So in paragraph four actually knows what he’s talking about.
All of these examples show how technology can help us to be more ethical by being accurate.
But this use of technology needs to be ethical. The proper sources need to be used, and the person using the sources needs to have good intention.
Technology has made it easier for members of the boardroom to know more about their target audiences; it shouldn’t be used as an excuse for invading people’s privacy to get their attention.
As an ethical issue, technology falls into the same dichotomy as so many other things we’re told. Look, but don’t touch. Proceed, but with caution.
Technology is there for us to use; it’s that tempting candy dish. But we should use it wisely, use it carefully, use it with others in mind.