Today’s discussion was about journalist ethics regarding lying. The first thing we learned in the handbook was to seek truth. It is unethical to seek truth by lying. If you have to lie to contract evidence and create a story, you shouldn’t report on it to begin with. Credibility in the world takes years to form, and one small situation/bad decision to destroy completely. If a journalist gets caught lying, who would want to share their story or even hire that person on? If you are going to just report, documentary, book, etc, eliminate bias. Be aware of it, and try to get rid of it. Objectivity is what a professional does. IF you’re going to influence it with your opinion, you have to label it and say it is a fiction. Once you put your own bias in it, you are not reporting anymore. Then, investigate the answers (eye-witness is least reliable) and see how accurate the information is. Ultimately, you can call your story whatever you want i.e. fictional story of true events.

The Journalist and the Murderer: non-fiction fiction

The conclusion of Malcolm’s investigation makes it clear there is a very fine line between presenting yourself as a sympathetic listener and pretending to be a friend. Malcolm never provides any conclusive proof or opinion regarding the guilt or innocence of Jeffrey MacDonald. The opinions and assertions of the people Malcolm interviews are never supported or finally proven. The only absolute she does assert at the end of the narrative is the absolute of ethical journalism. Malcolm provides no clear definition of ethics, but she does hold the ethics of journalism cannot be situational or gratuitous. Journalists are given a great amount of power, they provide the news and shape the world’s understanding of itself, and it is extremely important they hold to a certain code of ethics regardless of their subjects or circumstances.

Stephen Glass was the head of The New Republic’s fact-checking department and wrote articles for newspapers like The New Republic, Harper’s, and Rolling Stone.

Workers spent several weeks re-reporting all of Steve’s articles. It turned out that Steve had been making up characters, scenes, events, whole stories from first word to last. He made up some funny material, like a convention of Monica Lewinsky memorabilia. He also made up some really awful stuff: racist cab drivers, sexist Republicans, desperate poor people calling in to a psychic hotline, career-damaging quotes about politicians.

The newspaper eventually figured out that very few of his stories were completely true. Not only that, but he went to extreme lengths to hide his fabrications, filling notebooks with fake interview notes and creating fake business cards and fake voicemails.

Glass disappeared for awhile and lost contact with everyone. This article shows how credibility and ethics, if taken lightly, can be completely tarnished if and when people find out.

Fundamentals:

The first bullet that may strike some as confusing. Why am I talking about feelings? Because to truly regret something, you have to be able understand the feelings of those affected. So when writing a correction, think about how the wronged parties must feel. A correction that comes from a more human perspective is always going to be more effective.

The second bullet is simply a reminder that you need to write a correction that people can understand. Don’t try to minimize the impact of an error by offering a mealy-mouthed correction. This also relates to how journalists feel about our mistakes.

Human approach, visualization, match to facts/channels, and history

Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school investigates sexual assault allegations.

The Rolling Stone published the article with the belief it was accurate. In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, they made a judgment – the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. They go on to say in their apology that they should have not made this agreement with Jackie and should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story.

Some of the reasons people make unpublishing requests:

• Sources believe that a story was unfair or inaccurate.
• Those who have been acquitted, or whose charges were dropped, want crime stories about them to be removed.
• Source remorse
• Writer remorse

5 ways to handle this request:

• Unpublish a story
• Write an addendum (omission at end of piece)
• Write a follow-up story
• Take out source’s name, remove story from Google’s cache
• Run a correction

Honesty is good journalism. If you weren’t first with a story, or a piece of a story, someone will have read the first one. Even if you independently verified every fact in your own piece, linking shows the readers who saw both pieces that you are honest, acknowledging the work that came before and not pretending to be first.

Transparency is good journalism. Some readers want to see your work, and reading that other piece was part of your work, whether it guided your reporting or whether you were racing along the same path and the other reporter beat you to publication.

Attribution is good journalism. Often a journalist is actually relying on the work of another journalist. If you are quoting or paraphrasing another journalist’s work, attribute by name and link. Ethical journalism is more than just avoiding plagiarism. In digital journalism, attribution is incomplete without a link.

Context is good journalism. Rare is the story or blog post that tells everything you could possibly want to know about the subject at hand. Work by other journalists on the topic you are covering provides valuable context for your readers. So link to that work.

Brian Williams aired a heartwarming story on NBC Nightly News. He talked about a tribute he arranged for a retired soldier, who protected his NBC News crew during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Williams admitted he made a mistake by confusing whether the helicopter he rode in during the invasion was hit by ground fire. As it turns out, Williams’ version of events changed over the years.

There is enough information to say NBC News should review its editorial practices, however. Any news organization should have checks and balances in place to prevent the false memory of one person from being broadcast across the United States.

As many people pointed out over the last few days, it’s very possible Williams simply messed up the facts while remembering what happened 12 years ago.

Dr. Ford Vox, a brain injury specialist based in Atlanta, makes a case on why people should give Williams the benefit of doubt.

Regardless, news organizations practicing due diligence is important to all journalists and society by fact-checking before producing a package.

Less than 24 hours before the press conference at Columbia University in New York City, people devoured the 13,000-word report that called the magazine’s November 2014 story about an alleged gang rape a “journalistic failure that was avoidable.”

Instead of blaming the editorial process, which is largely cited in the report that Rolling Stone commissioned, the magazine’s managing editor says the staff simply has to not make the same mistake again. The magazine’s fact-checking chief is quoted as saying the editorial process isn’t the problem. Instead, the process was bypassed because of the topic – rape.

Rolling Stone could implement new and stronger policies in the three areas that “might have changed the final outcome,” according to the report. Those areas are the use of pseudonyms, checking derogatory information and confronting subjects with details.

The digital environment provides journalists new and more effective ways to practice transparency. Well-established transparency practices can be updated and adapted to a multi-platform world, and new, digitally native ones can also be applied.

Transparency adds value to the work we do, but it’s also a fundamental part of how we do our work.

1. Show the reporting and sources that support your work
2. Collaborate with audience
3. Curate and attribute information responsibly
4. Offer disclosures and statements of values
5. Correct website and social media errors effectively

As the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary approaches, it’s all horse race all the time in the news media with an almost exclusive focus on “insider” coverage of campaign strategy and a fascination with who’s ahead and who’s behind in the polls. In fact, it seems there’s never been a time in 2007 where issues have taken primacy over the sports game of political coverage.

Over the past forty years, the rise in horse race journalism has been called the “quiet revolution” in U.S. election reporting. Coverage focusing on the “game schema” frames elections in terms of strategy and political success rose from 45% of stories sampled in 1960 to more than 80% of stories in 1992. In comparison, coverage focusing on “policy schema,” framing elections in terms of policy and leadership, dropped from 50% of coverage in 1960 to just 10% of coverage analyzed in 1992.

Horse race journalism is fueled in part by industry trends and organizational imperatives. In a hyper-competitive news environment with a 24 hour news cycle and tight budgets, reporting the complexity of elections and policy debates in terms of the strategic game is simply easier, more efficient, and considered better business practice.

In terms of horse race coverage of policy debates, other than failing to provide context and background for audiences, the strategy frame’s preferred “he said, she said” style leads to a false balance in the treatment of technical issues such as climate change or the teaching evolution, issues where there is clear expert consensus. Polling experts offer other reservations. Experts warn that over-reliance on horse race journalism and polling potentially undermines public trust in the accuracy and validity of polling.