The Enquirer recently took down a story by a “contributor” who works for the organization her story promoted. That relationship was not included in the story or byline information. A growing ethic in online journalism involves updates, changes, corrections, deletions, etc. The news media are supposed to tell us when they do that. The Enquirer didn’t. I can’t find the story or an online explanation for its demise after a reader called the editors’ attention to the ethical misstep.
Then a Letter to the Editor accused The Enquirer of running a local guest column on the Brent Spence brouhaha without identifying the writer’s intimate involvement with a group whose cause he was promoting.
None of this is new. Public relations people and activists long have written “news” stories or opinion pieces that promoted their clients’ interest. If that link is clearly stated, fine. When that link is omitted, it’s deception.
• LEO Weekly, our sister paper in Louisville, collided with Sen. Mitch McConnell when his campaign staff barred LEO news editor Joe Sonka from a recent press conference.
The Courier-Journal said McConnell’s staff had a Louisville Metro police officer block Sonka at the door. The C-J said McConnell denied knowing why Sonka was prohibited from attending.
Sonka said he was told that he couldn’t attend because there was limited space, but The C-J said there were numerous empty chairs. Jesse Benton, McConnell’s campaign manager, told The C-J that Sonka was barred because one or more unnamed reporters objected to Sonka asking questions.
The C-J wrote, “This wasn’t the first time McConnell’s staff tried to keep Sonka out of an event. On Feb. 14, before a campaign appearance at a Louisville business, Sonka was asked to leave but was allowed to return by the businesses’ owner.”
Sonka told The C-J, “I think they were afraid I was going to ask him a question that he was going to have difficulty with. (Jesse Benton, McConnell’s campaign manager) said I could come in if I didn’t ask any questions, then when I told him I’d like to, he said he’d get the police to put me under arrest.”
• Coverage of Malaysia Flight 370 underlines the erosion of our ethical imperative to “check it out.” Rather than a retreat from traditional ethics, we may have a new imperative: publish and be damned. Let cable, the Internet and social media provide corrections, clarifications, elaborations, etc.
News media, relying on Malaysian officials and international technical sources, spent days misleading everyone on the fate of Flight 370.
I’ve lost count of theories offered for the missing plane and how quickly they were debunked or forgotten.
It got so goofy that CNN’s omnipresent Don Lemon repeated a viewer’s tweet, asking why a credible psychic hadn’t been called in to find the Boeing 777. After all, they help in all kinds of murders and missing persons. One of his panel of experts responded that there was no such thing as a “credible” psychic.
Caught between governments paranoid about the national security implications of radar/satellite sightings and true technical experts, news media were relegated to simple carriers of tales.
We still are as I write this.
Malaysia is saying that the plane is down and everyone is dead, relying on what the prime minister said is a novel approach to analyzing Flight 370‘s last radio/satellite contacts.
What happened to the “northern route”? Why if this crash was caused by human malice or insanity did it take hours to reach a remote patch of the Indian Ocean? Are we sure that a cargo of lithium batteries didn’t start a fatal fire that knocked out the pilots? Could everyone have been stricken by airline food?
We couldn’t check anything out. People who actually knew more than we reported — think spy satellite operators and intelligence analysts — weren’t speaking on or off the record. That’s why we covered the air and sea searches off the east coast of Malaysia.
It didn’t get better after the sharp turn back toward land became the conventional wisdom. We reported that and what we were told were the last radar contacts.
Then it got seriously weird. There was no way to check out the satellite images of something in the ocean between Australia and Antarctica. So we reported that search for days. If the crappy images shared with TV viewers were the best that searchers had, why did they bother?
Or what did they know that we couldn’t find out?
So we relied on “crowd sourcing,” in which everyone had a say on the latest or still-standing theories. Think of it as outsourcing the checking/verification that reporters were expected to do before publishing/posting a story.
Some of this is fed by Flight 370 becoming a cable — read CNN — generated story. Blame the indiscriminate retailing of theories de jour on our bred in the bone fear that some other news medium might get the right answer first.
Speed has been a competitive ingredient since mid-19th century reliance on carrier pigeons to supplement evolving telegraph links.
What we are seeing is a new perspective on verification before publication (TV, broadcast, Internet, social media, etc.)
If we can’t meet our traditional role of verification, then we have to be evermore scrupulous in telling our audience(s) that we could not verify the information.
• I’m not surprised that CNN and others poured resources into the Flight 370 drama that Crimea never would have commanded. Anyone who flies can imagine being on a plane when something goes awfully wrong. That’s why we make the irrational choice to drive when flying is an option. We have this unshakable fantasy that we’re more in control of our road trip than our flight.
• Putin must be thinking kind thoughts about whomever or whatever caused Flight 370 to go off course. While he was directing the land grab of Crimea from independent Ukraine, most of the news media were focused on the missing jetliner.
• Traditional reporters and photographers often see “great story” or “great photo” when people with normal sensitivities flinch. jimromenesko.com captured this CBS Newspath tweet recently: “GREAT VIDEO: Scene post-East Harlem building explosion shows injured and ambulances.” Someone higher up the food chain took it down, tweeting, “An unfortunate choice of words on our part during a breaking news situation. We can and will do better.”
• We should consider the narrowing socio-economic class from which young reporters, editors and photographers are drawn. This divide begins with reading habits in the home and access to post-secondary education. Successful internships provide huge advantages in the job hunt after graduation. Competition for the limited number of internships has been fierce for decades.
Internships at major news organizations traditionally were paid. At The Enquirer, I recall, interns got 75 percent of the pay of a first-year full-time reporter, copy editor or photographer. That opened these opportunities to just about any undergrad.
That’s been changing for years but one of the most brutal signs of the new times came recently from Thomson Reuters. A multinational news organization, it is auctioning an internship. Talkingpoints.com said the minimum bid for one week in Thomson Reuters’ Australia news bureau in Sydney was $750.
Pitched to parents, it promises to “give your son or daughter an insight into how the news is sourced, edited, verified and filed through state-of-the-art online systems.” The winning bid would be paid to ASX Charity Foundation; it’s a fundraising dinner prize.
Great. If they can afford it, parents should be able to give one more advantage to an aspiring journalist. But pay-to-play internships and the burden of college debt further concentrate the class-biases in tomorrow’s newsrooms.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2014.