Date: Tue Jun 28 10:52:39 EDT 2011
From: [Spring MEDP292 Student]@aol.com
Subject: Campus MovieFest Article
To: “Greggory W Morris” <gmorris@hunter.cuny.edu>

Dear NWU Journalism list members (hoping you’re still out there!),

I recently published an article with a music magazine–a profile of an up-and-coming artist. Unfortunately, two factual errors turned up in the published piece. One was a misunderstanding between the editor and me; the other was an honest oversight on my part. It was (understandably) embarrassing to me. I later received an email from the artist, who said (rightly) that I had never run the final draft by her before submission. If I had, the errors would have been caught. The reason I didn’t run it by the artist was mostly due to my own ego: I was trying to stay “objective,” to play the role of a “professional” journalist. The piece, however, was not so much a review as a profile, so my opinion played only a small part. Nonetheless, I wish now I had run the piece by the artist.

My question is, what are the ethics or proper conduct in consulting the artist? It seemed to me the artist and I, after hours of interviewing, had formed a nice relationship. Then by my “professional” behavior, I built a wall between us. Should I have just forgotten the damn “etiquette” and shown the artist the draft? It would have prevented the problems.

I will appreciate all good input.

His name is not important. But he was concerned about issues that are universal. This writer’s response:

The following response is based on my experience as a journalist at a Gannett newspaper in Rochester, NY;  The Washington Star in D.C., when it was alive and owned by Time magazine; Time, New York Post  and two nonfiction books by William Morrow and several years of teaching journalism and talking to journalists, attending workshops, conferences, blogging, etcetera:

1) What were /are the editorial guidelines for the publication? What were/are your editorial guidelines? Did/do you discuss these with your source(s) before you interview? Did you discuss these with the publication?

2) A fact checker at The Columbia Journalism Review many years ago contacted me about an article being published about me* and read to me all of the passages in which I was directly quoted. She would not discuss passages in which I was indirectly quoted. She did not tell me the gist of the article. She said at the time that what she was doing was according to CJR policy. By then, I had been a journalist for several years and didn’t realize that legitimate publications actually did that.**

3) In an early edition of The Investigative Reporters Handbook by the IRE, an author stated that for complex stories, sources identified in the story should be allowed to read the story before it is published in order to avoid mistakes. I learned of that practice shortly after I had learned of the CJR policy.

4) Now that I primarily blog and post on listservs and other Internet media, I am quick to apologize when I make a mistake. And I make it a big deal. That is, I have treated the corrections or clarifications as a big deal.**

5) I wouldn’t have shown the artist the draft though I might have gone over some parts.

6) So far, I haven’t done any harm.

And so it goes.

* The article was about an EEOC suit i was filing against a weekly news magazine.
** Some news organizations cut deals with their sacred cows.

Public Policy Polling released its second annual News Trust Poll yesterday, and what little coverage it received emphasized that Fox News is now America’s most distrusted TV news source and PBS the most trusted. — From boston.com.

Click here for more info.

Absolutely cool. I will be using this in my classrooms this semester. Slowly integrating, of course.

Part 4 of 4

I’ve decided on a succinct wrap-up to this matter.

Correction in Typical Envoy-ian Patois

Speaking my piece: I have a sense but don’t know with certainty the reason for Editor in Chief Ming Fearon’s decision to sling apocrypha and look insipidly silly (and make her cohorts look insipidly silly) in the process (for this tempest in a teapot, I have to admit).

Got up on the wrong side of her bed? Got up on the wrong side of the computer. A synaptic glitch? Nevertheless, dissing an instructor trying to assist a student publication with a reputation for bovine journalism is de rigueur  on this campus for this publication.

One wonders what the Envoy’s faculty adviser, D:F/M Professor Bernard Stein, advised her, if he did, about how to respond. The Correction above certainly doesn’t reflect the acumen of a Pulitzer Prize winning essay journalist (who happens to be affiliated with a family owned/operated weekly in Riverside, The Bronx, New York: The Riverside Press).

Nevertheless, “this” is probably not over.

Here are early posts about this matter.

“The news media’s duty is to report news, not help create it. The race to be first should not involve buying — directly or indirectly — interviews, an unseemly practice that raises questions of neutrality, integrity and credibility,” the Society of Professional Journalists said in a statement released December 28.

Read full statement here.

The top school administrator ignored or didn’t recognize the heresy involving ethical principles. “This allows student publications to be correct,” said Ellen Stein, Dalton’s head of school, defending the practice in a telephone interview with the Times. “I think fact checking is a good thing.”

The newspaper’s faculty advisor had slickly acquiesced as well. “The high school administration communicated a lengthy list of ‘dos’ and ‘do nots’ for Justice Kennedy’s visit,” faculty advisor Kevin Slick said in an e-mail message, according to the Times. The Daltonian “believed we could not publish anything without the approval of Justice Kennedy” or his office, Slick said, adding that “the series of constraints placed on his visit and subsequent interaction did not diminish the experience at all.”

That’s good that the experience – whatever that meant – possibly wasn’t diminished but important journalism principles were certainly skewered. A hell of a lesson for high school journalists. The incident is not that unusual, however. What is unusual is that it made it to the NYT, probably because it didn’t involve a Podunk H.S. or a Bumfuck H.S. but a Dalton Highbrow and, of course, a Supreme Court justice.

Full New York Times story.

P.S. When was the last time a Supreme Court justice came to New York to speak to a high school in Harlem or the South Bronx or an audience of students whose parents were working class? When was the last time a Justice spoke to a CUNY college? CUNY being the largest urban institution of its kind in the United States.

Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote

My Response to P. Woodward (a confession of sorts):

Thank you so much.

Now for my confession. When I was teaching at Rutgers, one of my students self-published this book, Cheating 101 (which was eventually translated into several languages). He asked me to read it and I did, and I offered suggestions about how he could pitch it to what eventually became the nation’s news media. And he did follow my advice, thus, spinning/deceiving NYT, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS and on and on and on. The very big and the small.

We concluded that because they didn’t take his “story” seriously – they did news stories but not hard news stories about the book, sort of as a light, interesting feature – they neither questioned nor challenged his comments the way they might have had if they had considered his “story” one to be taken seriously. Thus, he got great play.

We did two TV shows on affiliates, one in Philadelphia (where he was from) and I’ve forgotten the other. Not news shows. But the content of those shows spilled over into the news reporting which went on for several years. He eventually stopped doing interviews because the really big TV news-type feature shows poked fun at him.

That’s poke, not expose.

He got so much exposure that the Rutger’s Provost Office contacted a dean who contacted my department chair (Department of Journalism and Mass Media in the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, New Brunswick Campus) and told him to discredit him (and not because of the hyperbolic spin but because of worry that Rutgers was being embarrassed). Which they tried. There was a big discussion at a department meeting about how to discredit him. But that’s another story — about Academic Freedom.

However, he became a multimillionaire – he got out of the journalism business (worked for two Jersey Newspapers before he left the business) and started his own private investigation company. And he emailed me a few years ago that Rutgers invited him back to campus to bestow some kind of honor on him.

I’m mulling over writing a longer post which would include names.

I, however, did not say the following to P. Woodward. It’s generally known in journalism circles that small daily and weekly newspapers pretty much will print press releases verbatim – without checking for authenticity or accuracy or clarification. The usual explanation has been that they don’t have enough staff to do what the “big” newspapers do. Thus, seasoned media manipulators can reasonably expect an unscrutinized, free ride when they send their press releases.

And then, of course, there is the broadcast practice of VNRs, Fake TV News, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.

When I worked at my first newspaper in Rochester, New York, the Democrat & Chronicle – a “big” newspaper with sufficient staff – I learned that one of the tasks of the city editor back in those days was to make sure that press releases from Kodak were printed as soon as possible after they arrived at the news desk. The releases had to be checked, of course, that is, someone would have to call up the PR operation of Kodak to check for clarification and accuracy and, perhaps, for followup comments, but that press release material had to be published ASAP or there could be hell to pay.

And then, of course, there was this story of several years ago of this beginning reporter at the Newark Star-Ledger, Newark, New Jersey, who called an agency that had sent his newspaper a press release. The reporter did what I had been told to do with Kodak press releases (my first few months on the job), yet he was subsequently fired when someone from the agency contacted the news desk at the Ledger and asked, so to speak, what the H was going on. That is, why that reporter had had the nerve to call for a fact check instead of the newspaper printing verbatim.

And then, of course, there was this issue of Star-Ledger reporters working in for the organizations that were on their beats , like transportation and utilities. I learned this from one of my students who told me that her father, whose beat was utilities, like PSE&G, also worked in the PR office of PSE&G.

“No way,” I told her in my office on the News Brunswick campus of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. [Quotation Marks for Effect] 

“Dial this number,” she said. [QMfE]

And I did, and he answered the phone in the PR office of the utility even as he was working his beat for the Ledger. That is, he answered, [QMfE],“Star-Ledger” in the PR office of his second gig. I hung up without talking to him. It would have been distasteful as well as sinisterly outrageous to out him in front of his daughter in my office.

And I told that story years later to Dede Murphy, who was a big shot editor at the Ledger but before that, many years, of course, she had won a Polk Award as a reporter for the Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, where she started on her editor’s path, and she said, [QMfE], “You think that’s telling. Well, what about this one,” and she related this account of one of her reporters who also worked for an utility company, his second job, even as he worked his first: That was, like my student’s dad, from the PR office where he was bivouacking for his second job.

She wanted to fire him but couldn’t. Management would let her.  And, so, the Irish student able to pull off a Wikipedia scam because some reporters/editors at news organizations didn’t check the facts? My response if someone had asked for a comment: [QMfE] “Why not contact  Judith Miller - as well as her former editors/copyeditors/wordsmiths for comment?”