The breathless coverage of every post, sketch and fart of the Trump trial in New York has cable news in a lather these days. Without cameras being allowed in the courtroom, but still having all sorts of time to fill, television has seemingly turned everything about this thing into the Zapruder film. In his return to “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart used his Monday opening to castigate these folks for their approach to “news” in this situation:
Stewart has long said he’s not a news journalist, so it might be easy to dismiss his critique as arrogance mixed with humor. That’s why we dug out today’s throwback post from four years ago, when Jim Lehrer died to make the same case for us.
Below is a brief tribute to Lehrer upon his death as well as a recap of his “rules” that really should guide our work in a time in which it seems like every shiny object can distract us and minutia can rule the news cycle.
Jim Lehrer’s rules matter now more than ever
Jim Lehrer, a journalist’s journalist to the core, died Thursday (Jan. 23, 2020) at the age of 85. He spent decades of his life covering politics, corporations, international affairs and more, and yet had the none of the pretense associated with the greatness he encountered or the epic stories he conveyed:
Jim was calm and careful in moments of crisis, as demonstrated by his coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“I’m Jim Lehrer. Terrorists used hijacked airliners to kill Americans on this, September 11, 2001,” Jim reported on national television. “Another day of infamy for the United States of America.”’
Lehrer essentially retired about a decade ago, and he did his work on public television, so it’s likely few folks under a certain age would remember much about him. Truth be told, he was really just a name and a standard to me for much of my life: A symbol of straightforward reporting and a talent to which one should aspire in the field.
However, among the many obituaries written on this titan of news, I came across Jim Lehrer’s Rules, guiding principles he used that can and should continue to influence generations of media students to come. (The world in general would probably be a nicer place, too, if non-media folks kept an eye on these things as well.)
These may seem quaint in the era of “Screaming Head” journalism, opinion-as-fact reporting, “sources say” coverage and a general sense that members of the general public have the IQ of a salad bar. However, with very limited quibbling, I could clearly defend each of these as something worth striving toward in our field.
Jim Lehrer’s Rules
Do nothing I cannot defend.
Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.
Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.
Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am.
Assume the same about all people on whom I report.
Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise.
Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label everything
Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should be allowed to attack another anonymously.
Me to kids who use AI to cheat: “What I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you…”
I often wonder when I’m reading some of the essay work I get these days that is clearly written by generative artificial intelligence if my students are lazy and stupid or if they think I am.
Truth be told, I usually don’t have a lot of problems in this area because AI has yet to master the art of writing for the media, as it has clearly and repeatedly demonstrated. However, from time to time, I have a class that requires a reflection paper or personal essay, and suddenly, the students who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with a searchlight and a posse have managed to put Shakespeare to shame.
In one case, I found about 20 percent of the kids had completely or mostly written their ETHICS assignment using artificial intelligence programs. The irony on that is so thick, you couldn’t cut through it with a chainsaw.
In another case, I gave students a 1-1.5 page, typed, double-spaced reflection paper before each test that is there to do nothing but make them think about what we covered in the chunk of the class leading up to the test. I did this so that the kids who suck at multiple choice could have a chance to express themselves and to also defray the overall impact of each test.
The prompt was laughably simple. Tell me briefly:
What we covered that you already knew before you took the class
What we covered that you didn’t know before you took the class
What we touched on that you would want to know more about.
That’s it. If you can fog a mirror, it’s almost a guaranteed B+. If you can write a word or two in the mirror fog with your finger, it’s practically an A.
Caught at least one kid AI-ing it, through basic common sense, journalistic skepticism and checking through multiple detection programs. I’ve gotten to the point that I can almost tell exactly WHICH program they used to write it.
And, yes, it’s really quite upsetting. (I’d use other words to describe my feelings on this, but Sage is trying to sell a book or two here.)
As friends and colleagues have told me that this kind of thing is “rampant” on their campuses as well, I figured I’d break out this throwback post on why cheating in journalism (especially in terms of AI stuff) is a really, really bad idea:
4 Self-Serving Reasons Not to Cheat in a Journalism Course
At the beginning of each semester, most professors I know give some version of the “Don’t Cheat” lecture. We explain the university policies about cheating and how we can make your life so miserable that you will wish you had never been born. We outline the logical reasoning behind avoiding unethical behavior and try to guilt you into acting right.
And right about now is where we start to notice that none of that really sunk in for some of our students.
Somewhere between midterms and finals week is where I tend to find whatever cheating I’m likely to notice over the span of a semester. It’s always the same: The student who couldn’t write a sentence with a subject and a verb is suddenly putting Bob Woodward to shame. The kid who spent the last two weeks in our “draft” sessions with nothing done suddenly produces a magnum opus in two days. The story I get from a student that seems shockingly familiar for some reason, mainly because his roommate turned in the same thing last semester.
It’s also the same when the students are confronted. They go through all five stages of grief in about three minutes: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. (Or, in at least one case, a note from a parent that told me “The family lawyer will be in touch.) It’s gotten so bad that I keep tissues hidden in my office for that exact moment when a student suddenly realizes there is no way out and tears begin flowing. (For the record, men cry as much or more than women do when the stuff hits the fan like this.)
Since journalism is always about telling people “What’s in it for me?”, consider these four self-serving reasons why you shouldn’t cheat, least of all in a journalism course:
You have much worse odds of getting away with it: Students have come up with so many great ways of cheating on various tests, projects, quizzes and assignments, it gives me hope for the future in terms of innovation. There are the water bottle labels with the answers printed on them. There is the “phone/texting” thing that students have developed over the years. There are “cheat sheets” and “crib notes” written in places that defy logic.
Many journalism classes, however, are performance based and skill structured, so it’s not about memorizing things and regurgitating them, so those tricks don’t always apply. Instead, students tend to plagiarize from published material, use stuff from sources that don’t exist or otherwise “improvise” their ways around their writing assignments and tests.
Here’s the problem with that: Journalists and journalism professors (a.k.a. former journalists) are naturally suspicious, so they have a harder time believing that you managed to track down the governor for a sit-down interview on deadline. They are trained researchers, so they know how to fact check and verify stuff through a number of platforms beyond “TurnItIn.” They usually have connections with sources in the area, so it’s not a stretch to imagine them calling up a city council rep, a high school football coach or an administrator and asking, “Hey, did you have an interview with someone in my course and say XYZ?”
The whole purpose of being a journalist is to dig past the BS veneer that people show us and get to the heart of the truth.
We live for this. And trust me, our ability to dig is better than your ability to hide at this point in your career.
You really piss us off and trust us, you don’t want that: When journalists dig into something, we are like a dog with a Frisbee: We just don’t let go. Most of the time, when someone lies to us, we are desperate to dig even deeper to determine how bad this is and what else that person might be lying about.
We will be bound and determined to dig into EVERY, SINGLE, OTHER thing you have EVER written for us and see if there is ANYTHING you did that fits this pattern of plagiarism. We will talk to colleagues about you to see if you were in their classes and see if they had any inclination that you might not be producing work that is on the level. We will look to see what penalties are available and how far this can all go.
The reason is that we operate in a field where trust is earned and all you have is your reputation. If you throw that all away over a crappy assignment in a single college course, what’s going to happen when you get out in the field? Even more, if you go out there with a degree from our institution and people know you had us as professors, how will that reflect on us when you do something this pathologically stupid on the job? Those kinds of thoughts keep a lot of us up at night, not out of fear but out of anger. We are not about to let our field slide into the Dumpster (or further into the Dumpster) because you cheated when you felt “overwhelmed” by your six extracurricular activities and the death of your goldfish. In most cases, professors will be far more forgiving if you essentially tell them everything up front when you can’t complete an assignment. If you cheat, we have a burning desire to make sure you don’t get away with it.
Two degrees of separation: The concept of “Six Degrees of Separation” explains that we are all somehow connected to every other person on Earth through no more than six links. In the field of journalism, however, that linkage is a lot shorter.
I have done no definitive work on this, but if I had to guess, I’d say those of us in journalism are probably operating within two or three degrees. Case in point happened this weekend at the college media convention I attended: I was reviewing a student newspaper from Florida when I mentioned that I had a number of former students working in the state. One of the students said that she was in frequent contact with an editor of a particular newspaper. I recognized the name immediately as one of my former students and did the old “humblebrag” thing about it. “Really?” the student asked, her eyes lighting up. “Could you tell her you met me and that I’m really interested in the paper?” She was a smart kid and I liked what I had read in her stories I was critiquing, so I said sure. I dashed off a simple email to my former student about this woman and moved on with life. Today, I got this message back:
Vince,
Small world!
We are considering her for a spring internship. Your recommendation just put her at the top of list.
Hope you are doing well.
I honestly don’t know if my email helped or if maybe the editor was trying to make me feel good about myself, but the underlying point remains: In the most random place and set of circumstances possible in journalism, I was linked to two people in the field like that. This kind of connection is invaluable in our field if the word on the street about you is good. If you plagiarize and get caught, the word on the street spreads as well and, simply put, everybody in this field seems to know everybody else somehow. The “A” you got on that plagiarized assignment better be worth knowing that you will never get a job because everywhere you go, someone will know someone who knows about it.
You will never really recover: My dad was fond of telling me that if I ever planned to steal something, I shouldn’t steal a candy bar from a store. Instead, I should steal the whole store, as in when the owner came back the next day, all that was left would be a basement and some wires sticking out of the ground. The reason Dad had for this was simple: If you steal something, no matter how big or small, you’re a thief. If you’re going to steal and ruin your life, you might as well do it for something that matters.
Obviously, his point wasn’t that I should go big or go home, but rather that if I took that path of thievery, I’d never be able to recover everything I lost because of the stupid choice I made. The same is true in plagiarism, cheating and more.
The famous cases are always the ones your professors roll out for you during the semester: Stephen Glass, the wunderkind of the New Republic, who falsified dozens of stories before being forced out in disgrace. He is now a graduate of law school who still can’t practice law because of his prior transgressions. Jayson Blair, the rising star at the New York Times, who supposedly broke stories about the D.C. sniper case, turned out to be a serial liar. He now lives in Virginia and said he knows he could never go back to journalism because of the trust he broke. Janet Cooke, who wrote a compelling tale of an 8-year-old heroin addict name Jimmy, returned the Pulitzer Prize she won after it turned out she made him up. Today, as the story linked above notes, she lives in the U.S. and works in a field not associated with writing.
Beyond those “big names” are the day-in, day-out foul ups that cost people everything. I was on an ethics panel last week when one of my fellow panelists told a story of a student who made things up or plagiarized content. His name was so clearly bad in the field, he ended up legally changing it.
I still have the “ethical agreement” one of our writers signed at the student paper shortly before he made up an entire softball story. We only caught him because someone on the sports desk was roommates with a guy who was dating a softball player and she mentioned it in passing. I have no idea what ever happened to that guy after we fired him, but I do pull out that agreement from time to time and show students. His name is etched in their minds as a cautionary tale.
Interestingly for me, I find that this kind of stuff happens most with my upper-level classes. Freshmen and sophomores screw up occasionally by bumping into a problem when they don’t know any better. However, it’s the seniors who are getting ready to graduate that actively cheat. Why? My theories vary.
Look, we all get it. Everyone in journalism has felt the pressure at one point in time. Deadline is approaching, we get caught short and we figure, “If I can just cut this corner this one time, I’ll survive.” The truth is, it’s not worth it. If you screw up that assignment, the worst that happens to you is that you fail that one piece or that one test. If you cheat on that assignment, everything gets so much worse.
A quick example of how a free AI program can make something ridiculous look like a religious oil painting. The prompt? “Jesus Christ Rides A Unicorn.” (And, yes, based on the background here, apparently there is a unicorn for you in heaven, if you behave yourself…)
The White House on Thursday morning released its first government-wide policy aimed at mitigating the risks of artificial intelligence (AI), requiring agencies to take further action to report the use of AI and address risks the technology may pose.
Federal agencies will be required to designate a chief AI officer, report how they use AI and add safeguards as part of the White House memo.
The policies include a requirement that governmental offices list what they use AI for, how important it is and to what degree those uses create “safety-impacting and rights-impacting” risks. It is completely unclear if these regulations will do anything, helpful OR harmful, as we continue to muddle through life with AI programs.
ISSUES WITH AI: You can’t throw a rock at anything these days without it likely hitting something to do with AI. Or maybe even something generated with AI.
As is the case with most technological advances, the early days of generative AI are becoming an insane wild west, in which their appear to be no limits to what people can do with it. As the law tries to catch up and corral this chaos, a lot of things are happening in the public regarding that people have trouble coming to grips with.
Catherine, Princess of Wales, was out of the public eye, leading to wild speculation as to what happened to her. In an attempt to quell the concerns, the Royal Family released a family photo, which was later determined to be an AI concoction. She then filmed a video spot, in which she revealed she was dealing with a cancer diagnosis. Naturally, this is now under AI suspicion.
The situation has become even worse for non-famous folks, as schools are now grappling with AI being used to create nude deep-fake photos of kids and teachers. That’s right: Some kid at your school could grab one of your photos from a social media post and do something sexually disgusting with it for their own gratification without your knowledge. As a parent, that terrifies me. As the ugliest bald Wookie in Wisconsin, I feel relatively safe.
SO WHY NOT BAN IT? The AI genie is already out of the bottle, so a ban is unlikely to work, even if we wanted to do so. As experts in the field note, not only has AI been around for a long time, but we have gotten used to what it can do for us:
It automates tasks: If you like the idea of having a spellchecker, a digital calculator and a computer program that can build lines of code in a hurry, you want to keep AI around for a while. The artificial intelligence model is basically one in which machines do things that were once only thought of as being capable in the human mind. A full ban removes all that and trying to draw a specific line between important function and disgusting crap isn’t easy.
It personalizes content: The whole reason you get what you want online and why those “suggested purchases” actually are things you’d buy comes down to AI. The systems get to “know us” and then find ways of matching us with other things we might like. (In writing that sentence, I’m both amazed and profoundly creeped out…) Who you connect with online, what suggestions you get for places to eat and what cute puppies are available for adoption in your area often comes down to AI’s understanding of you.
It expands our knowledge: AI can do things we can only imagine, which gives us the chance to figure out all sorts of answers to problems that were once beyond our reach. Sure, medical advances and such might be a bit further away even with AI, but people in the field of electrical work are already seeing amazing opportunities.
These and other opportunities are on the horizon, so long as we can get people to stop making nude photos of each other for a few minutes and do something useful with this tech.
DISCUSSION STARTER: How aware are you of what generative AI can do? Have you experimented with any of the image creators or text creators out there? What has your experience been, in terms of quality and outcomes?
What kinds of limits do you think are necessary for people to co-exist with AI content? How would you go about enforcing them within the confines of the laws of the land as they stand now?
When I teach my media writing students about press release writing, we often stop at the line “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” and have a discussion.
I’ve heard from some pros that this kind of thing isn’t needed any more, and I’ve heard from other pros that it’s still a standard item, even as its value slides toward the realm of ending a press release with “-30-” or “###”
In keeping it on there, I make the argument that I’d rather show them something that only half of the world is doing and they can cut it out if they work for the other half. In addition, they may need to replace that line with an embargo statement in some cases.
An embargoed press release is meant to benefit both the PR practitioners and the reporters covering their clients’ activities. In some cases, practitioners want to give reporters a running start at an event or announcement, but don’t want the reporters to make that information public before the practitioners do. To that end, the practitioners provide material that they note has an “embargo” on it until a specific time or date. This article on LinkedIn does a pretty good job of outlining the basics of the embargo process and the rationale for it.
Embargoes of this nature tend to be based in professional courtesy (or what people used to call a “gentlemen’s agreement”) in that the PR professionals have no legal say over what the reporters do with this stuff or when. That said, if you’re the reporter who screws over someone by publishing embargoed material before its time, you will likely be on the outs with the PR folks who offered you this courtesy and you might screw it up for everyone else.
Here are some thoughts that might help make this process work the way it should:
SHARE EXPECTATIONS: Professor Sue Robinson of UW-Madison makes a great point about this in the Isthmus article: If both sides aren’t understanding each other, this isn’t going to work.
Like most traditions, people often lose track of how they work or why they start. When there were only a handful of news outlets and everyone kind of came up through the ranks the same way, these traditions were more likely to be shared and understood. Today, everyone can be a publisher and not everyone gets the same level of “education” about how certain things work.
I make a similar argument in my books about the concept of “off the record” and how that works. In most cases, people don’t have a firm grasp of what it means or how it works, so there can be confusion and anger when things go south. When we all know what the rules are, we’re more likely to play by them if the rules make sense. That leads us to point two…
DON’T GET “EMBARGO-HAPPY:” Like any other tool, if you use it for the wrong reasons or rely on it too much, it’s not going to be effective. One of the reporters in the Isthmus story noted that people seem to be embargoing everything lately, which makes it kind of a meaningless element of the press release.
Think of an embargo as a NEED item, based on timing. For example, when the governor is going to give the State of the State address, it makes sense to share the text of the speech early so reporters can work on deadline stories. It also makes sense put an embargo on it, as the governor would probably like to tell people what he thinks about the State of the State before the news media does.
That said, every appearance the governor makes at a local Taco Bell doesn’t require a full press brigade and an embargo. If you want to tell the press something, then announce it. If you don’t, don’t. If you feel like you have to hold something back and let them show up to figure it out, that can work, too. However, a constant stream of embargoes isn’t going to work out well for anyone.
DEAL WITH TRUST ACCORDINGLY: In the media realm, trust and credibility are our only true currency. These things aren’t like boomerangs, in that if you throw them away, they don’t come back. If someone knowingly screws you over, they’ve blown their bank account and you don’t have to extend them any additional line of credit at the Bank of Journalistic Trust.
If a reporter breaks faith and fails to see this as a problem, PR practitioners have no reason to trust them. That’s not bias. That’s common sense. If both sides agree to Point One and Point Two, this shouldn’t be hard to manage. However, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It’s also a good way to end up in the unemployment line in a situation like this, so treat people the way they have demonstrated they should be treated.
I know that there are a solid number of you out there who actually abide by the request in this post most of the time. That said, that number appears to be dwindling significantly recently, so I need to make this plea.
I’ve always believed that as a professor, I owe it to you to try to explain things so that you can understand them. I also believe that if I don’t actually SAY something in explicit terms, it’s my fault when you screw up. If I do my best to lay it out, like I’m trying to teach a dog how to do calculus, and you still screw up, well, then, that’s on you.
I felt the need to put this post together after the first half of a semester that had me utterly vexed and befuddled at the current state of my courses. This isn’t a typical semester in which I have a couple kids who skip class constantly, a few others who fake their way around a few things and some dumb-ass behavior that makes me question the functionality of at least one student’s frontal lobes. There will always be one kid who shows up late so often I swear they’ll be late for their own funeral.
And it isn’t about the life events that get in the way for all of us. I still get the “I’m sick” emails or the notes about emergency surgeries and funerals. That happens all the time and, honestly, any professor who doesn’t understand this is someone I don’t want to know.
No, this appears to be a pandemic level of “I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit-itis” that has hit in a way I’ve never seen before on the college level. I had students miss deadlines for quizzes, writing assignments and even exams. Students were given days and even weeks to meet those goals, only to let the deadlines go by like a knee-buckling curve ball.
This isn’t just affecting my intro-level students, as several folks who are in their senior year have forgotten about midterms. The excuses are of the “I have no excuses, but let me fix this anyway” variety, with a steady stream of “I was unaware” emails, which appeared strange to me, given that I’d posted the information in the syllabus, flagged the deadline in the LMS and spoken repeatedly about it in class.
I keep thinking that these folks are suffering from whatever the hell Guy Pearce had in “Memento” and I’m strongly considering bring tattoo kits to class:
This also isn’t just affecting the students here at UWO, as I asked the hivemind of educators I trust if they’ve seen this as well. It turns out this is hitting states across the country, even those that haven’t recently legalized weed or consider a pub crawl to be a national holiday. A constant stream of attempting to spoon-feed students review questions, examples, instructions and extended deadlines has not proven to be a panacea for this situation.
Some educators speculate that this might be some sort of “long COVID” impact, with the idea that college students who spent their formative years merely trying to survive what we all assumed was the end of days weren’t properly prepared for self-reliance in their education. Others wondered if students felt their college efforts lacked value, given the high number of good-paying jobs that are currently available, sans a college degree. Still others pondered about the effects of artificial intelligence, as students looked for easier ways to get out of work. My sister-in-law, who teaches dance, had this insight:
“People are just lazy. We have a new generation of stupid on our hands.”
The cause and the cure are outside of my scope of knowledge, as I’m really not that kind of doctor. That said, please consider the following advice, as you move forward into the second half of the semester. Some of this may seem like it’s stuff you heard in second grade, but that’s probably because we need to dive that far back into the realm of education to properly reboot a few folks:
GIVE A SHIT: This is really the core of everything I’m going to say below, but again it bears repeating. If the way in which my 8 a.m. class tends to listen, I might have to say this six or seven more time before we’re done here.
I have told students over the years that the one thing I absolutely cannot teach them is how to care about a course. I can teach the basics of all sorts of rudimentary journalism skills and quite a few higher-level elements at that. I can teach students how to be tough, or brave, or nosy, or a dozen other “soft skills” that can aid them in their work.
The one thing I can’t make them do is “wanna.” If you don’t “wanna,” I can’t help you.
I get that not every course is your muse and that every class is not an Academy-Award-winning performance on the part of your instructor, but I know that a lot of us are really trying to make a difference. However, if you don’t care, it doesn’t matter.
And, if you don’t care, you should probably think about why you’re sitting in that classroom, spending a boatload of money that you’ll spend decades of your life paying back.
READ DIRECTIONS: When I was growing up, we were inundated with ads for a program called RIF: Reading Is Fundamental. The idea was that if you couldn’t read, you probably weren’t going anywhere in life:
This is really true in college, as you should be somewhere further along in your personal literacy than the crew of kids surrounding a relatively young Ed Asner here. Reading directions is a fantastic way of figuring out how much content you have to write, how many citations you need to include or even when something is due.
It might not be as much fun as if we did the directions in a TikTok, but when the Feds block this app for fear that the Chinese government is using it to figure out how stupid we all are, those literacy skills might come in handy.
PAY ATTENTION: College professors often have difficulty when we see you on laptops and tablets during class, because we’d love to pretend that you’re using these items to take copious notes and add deadlines to your calendars. However, when we call on you to verbally add your thoughts to the topic under discussion and your head pops up like a prairie dog getting electroshock therapy, you kind of give up the game.
Look, I get that we’re boring, despite how hard we work. I also know that not everything will apply to any one student in class. That said, you are PAYING for this. It’s like buying entry to the Golden Corral buffet and then quietly sipping a water in the corner. If that’s all you’re doing, why the hell did you come here?
Paying attention in class is a great way to actually learn stuff. This is particularly true if you are opposed to reading directions. I’m a big fan of both, but you need to do one or the other in order to survive in college. Neither of these things is asking too much or should come as a massive shock to you. We showed you the library, the classrooms and even professors’ offices during your campus tour: Books and lectures were not hidden from you.
Unless, of course, you were on your phone the whole time…
STOP PSEUDO-APOLOGIZING: I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten that start with “I’m sorry” and then follow that up with a detailed outline of some easily avoidable screw up. I finally went and looked up what an apology actually entails and this is what I’ve found:
The Three A’s of Apologies
Acknowledgement. Acknowledge the situation and say you are sorry for what happened.
Acceptance. Hold yourself accountable and work to rectify the situation.
Amends. Talk about what you will do and start working on corrective measures.
What I’ve come to realize is that most of the apologies I get had none of those elements to them.
You’re not really sorry, in the idea that you are acknowledging the situation. Hell, some of you wouldn’t realize you’ve been hit by a bus until your phone told you as much or your Apple Watch stopped tracking your pulse. You just don’t like the negative outcome of what occurred and you want some way out of it.
You aren’t really accepting anything. Some of the emails I get say that the sender “will accept whatever punishment” I have in mind, but quickly following that up with “but I would really like it if (Fill in way of getting away with screwing up here).”
Also, I’m looking for amends. Maybe the sacrifice of a fatted calf would be a bit much, but some actual contrition and showing up on time for at least a week or two would help.
DON’T LIE: Journalists deal with weasels for most of our lives. This is why we have such great BS detectors and why we love nailing liars to the wall. In most cases, the lies students tell are so frickin’ unnecessary that they boggle the mind.
Case in point: I had a student tell me last week that she was going to miss class because she was sick. Totally fine, as they get two skips the whole term, and I don’t care what they’re for. I even go out of my way to say, “Look, if you want to tell me, ‘I got totally ‘faced last night and I reek of vomit and vodka sweat, so I’m skipping,’ I’m fine with that.”
However, when I got home, I found out from my kid that she met one of my students, who was applying for a job at the Olive Garden where Zoe works. It was my bed-ridden sickly waif who couldn’t make it to class, because it turned out her interview for the job was at that time.
The same thing applies to using AI to write your papers. We read enough college writing to know when something comes from a college student and when something comes from a computerized dictionary that spasms content. We also know that nobody writes to EXACTLY 500 words, so stop telling AI to write you a 500-word paper on a given topic.
I have worked ridiculously hard to be an empathetic ally to my students, so when I’m doing that and you lie to me, it makes me want to bring down a raging storm of hellfire upon you.
QUIT WASTING OUR TIME: After all of this, if you STILL can’t find it in your heart and soul to give a shit, that’s fine. Just stop wasting our time.
Believe it or not, some of your colleagues out there are desperate for help. They are applying for internships and jobs, but need help with resumes and cover letters. They are trying to bend their brains around this new form of writing that will be the foundation upon which a lot of their work after college will depend. They actually mean it when they stop by the office and start the conversation with, “Sorry to bother you, but…”
Every time you turn in some AI bullshit, you make us waste time determining how you cheated and filling out paperwork to have you penalized somehow. Every time you skip a class because “OMG earleeeee,” you make us waste time catching you up. Every time you blow a deadline and beg for forgiveness, you make us waste time taking a moral index of ourselves to see if we should bend a rule and help you out.
That’s time we could be spending on people who actually and honestly need our help and want to do the work. You’re not just annoying us, but you are actively depriving other people of an education they paid for and value.
If you can’t get to the point where you’re going to become one of those people, fine, just don’t make the rest of us suffer because of it.
I would tell you to just go work at Olive Garden, because I know they’re hiring, but something tells me their standards are probably higher than those we have here at the U.
Trying to make ethics real to students isn’t always easy. Fictional scenarios only go so far, as students can be unrealistically brave (“I’d tell my editor to kiss my grits and I’d quit!”) or fall into “Lebowski mode.”
In my freelance class, we talked about the various elements of ethics (honesty, integrity etc.) as well as some of the crucial aspects of what makes life a little different for freelancers (You only eat what you kill. You might have differing standards for different editors. etc.)
That said, I think I accidentally bumped into one of the more engaging assignments of the entire class. Here’s the story:
I have no attendance policy for the freelancing class, other than to say, “If you skip class, you’re losing out on whatever important thing we’re doing that day.” I figure, hell, they’re paying for the class through their tuition. If they want to treat my class like that Planet Fitness membership they haven’t cancelled over the past six years, despite never actually going to Planet Fitness, well, fine by me.
Only half of the students dragged themselves to the 8 a.m. class in the bitter cold on the day we had the ethics lecture. After we mulled the ethics of ethics and so forth, I asked them to consider the following:
“How would you feel ethically if I decided to just give you 100 percent on the third (final) story you have for this class because you showed up today?” In other words, I waive the assignment, you get the points. It’s like you showed up and you got a free cookie for doing so.
It was like pulling teeth to get them to discuss it at first. Some were happy to take it, others said, “Well, I’d feel a little guilty, but…” Eventually, they kind of settled in with the, “Gee, I don’t know but it sounds nice in theory” outcome.
So, I told them, “I’m going to leave the room. You have 15 minutes to come to a conclusion on if this should happen or not for real. If you don’t all agree, nothing happens. If you all agree on getting the freebie, it will happen. Go for it.”
As I sat in my office, I could hear the arguing, the overlapping voices and the frequent of yelling of “YEAH, BUT, WAIT…” After the 15 minutes, the appointed spokesperson of the group tossed open the door and yelled, “UNNNNGGHHH! FILAK! WE’RE READY!”
They explained that they were going to take the freebie and why they thought it was OK. Some justified it as they were always there and other people tended to skip a lot. (“One of the people not here just Snapchatted me a picture of themself in bed, so I don’t feel bad at all about this…” one student noted.)
Some said they figure life is a lot of luck of the draw, so they just got the lucky draw. Others said the benefit didn’t technically hurt anyone, as it wasn’t like the people who DIDN’T get the free pass had to do MORE than they would have otherwise.
I then said that they had really touched on all the areas except for one that seemed a little obvious. I asked a student if she had covered a vintage clothing event she was paid to do as a freelancer. When she said she did, I asked, “So, what if, after you published this piece, the person who organized the event came up to you and thanked you for such a nice story and gave you a $100 gift certificate to her vintage clothing store? Is that OK? I mean, you’re getting a benefit for something you would have done anyway, right?”
The student just stared at me. The young lady next to her said, “I think I want to change my vote.”
Then one kid asked me, “Is this real? I mean… some of us weren’t really sure that you meant it.”
“No,” I said. “This is real. You get the freebie.”
“My stomach kind of hurts,” another kid said. “This just feels weird now.”
I dismissed the class and they kept talking about it as they walked down the hall, some arguing while others trying to reassure themselves this was fine.
I hadn’t planned this at all, nor did I really think of how it would pan out, but here are a couple things this exercise ended up emphasizing:
REAL LIFE ETHICS ARE HARD: In life, there are a number of decisions I’ve made that I look back on and think, “What if I’d gone the other way?” Almost all of them are ones in which ethics are deeply ingrained.
I’ve never been a fan of debating ethics in a classroom setting because it feels like a false front to me. It’s the same reason I have trouble teaching crime reporting in a classroom: I could do a fake press conference about a fatal accident or have kids “role play” a terrible scenario, but in the end, it’s not real. While ethical debates give the students some things to consider, the impact isn’t there.
The thing that made this situation hard for them was that there were real consequences. They got something for free, which they likely felt they didn’t earn. It was an all-or-nothing situation, which I have found many students don’t like, as they prefer to hedge their bets as opposed to putting it all on 23 Red and spinning the wheel. It was something they really wanted, but they also felt guilty about their good fortune when compared to that of their missing colleagues. Which leads to point two…
GUILT IS A BITCH: One of my favorite discussions ever happened during the weekend I got married. My best man, Adam, came from a traditional Jewish family, while I and the rest of my kin were mostly in the Catholic realm. During the downtime before the wedding, Adam sidled up to me and said, “You’re on to something about Catholic guilt.”
Over the years, we’d had these great debates over whose faith had the bigger slice of the guilt pie. He argued that the stereotypical “Jewish mother” guilt was both real and unrelenting when it came from people within one’s family, while I argued that the less-direct Catholic guilt was like the smell generated from one of those plug-in oil things: It is everywhere and it just hangs there all around you.
In the end, we kind of came to the agreement that this was like arguing Hank Aaron vs. Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle vs. Joe DiMaggio: It all depends on how you slice the argument, but both are more than worthy of greatness. Guilt, be it Catholic guilt, Jewish guilt or other similar guilt is really a pain.
The situation in class drove that home for me. These kids were literally getting stomach aches and headaches as they tried to wrap their brains around the idea of what was being offered and if they should take it. The emotion most of them came back to was one of guilt.
I’m not saying that’s good or bad, although guilt has led me to both good and mediocre decisions in life, but to have so many people from so many different backgrounds have their mental state coalesce around one emotion really says something.
THERE IS NO GOOD DECISION: One of the things I tell students a lot is that if you end up dealing with an ethical dilemma and you feel perfect at the end of your decision-making process, you really didn’t have an ethical dilemma. Dealing with these kinds of things in journalism is a lot like this scene from “Argo:”
There can be situations where you feel better or worse about the choices and the outcomes, but at the end of the day, you really don’t get to feel like everything is perfect. The key is to learn from each situation and make better bad decisions as you move forward.
“I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again,” Thompson said. “I would make up the report sometimes because, A, the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime or it was too late and I was like, I didn’t want to screw up the report, so I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.'”
She then explained there was no harm in anything she would say to audiences.
“No coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field,'” she continued. “Like, they’re not gonna correct me on that. I’m like it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.”
“When on a podcast this week, I said I would make up reports early in my career when I worked as a sideline reporter before I transitioned to my current host role,” she said.
“Working in the media I understand how important words are and I chose wrong words to describe the situation. I’m sorry. I have never lied about anything or been unethical during my time as a sports broadcaster.
“In the absence of a coach providing any information that could further my report I would use information that I learned and saw during the first half to create my report. For example if a team was 0 for 7 on 3rd down, that would clearly be an area they need to improve on in the second half. In these instances I never attributed anything said to a player or coach.
So, if you’re following along at home, Thompson glibly did the “I’m so cool I can make stuff up and nobody cares” thing until she realized that EVERYBODY cares about the accuracy of sports journalism. Then, she did the “I chose my words poorly” thing, which is usually saved for when people make a career-ending comment and are desperately trying to save their careers.
It’s not a rare thing, unfortunately, to talk about people in journalism breaking the basic ethical codes of the field. It also seems to be in some of the dumbest possible circumstances, in that you rarely see a story like the one Jayson Blair made up about the D.C. Sniper and more so in situation where a reporter didn’t feel like asking a salt-of-the-earth pancake-eating source what they thought of inflation.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: The first and most obvious thing is that, as a journalist, you don’t make stuff up. You can’t include the word “reporter” in your title and then pretend that the tenets of accuracy and honesty don’t apply to you.
When I look at the career of a sideline reporter, I can’t imagine a more difficult job because of who tends to fill it, how the world tends to perceive them and how hard they have to hustle. The majority of these reporters are women, and sports have never been too kindly to female journalists. The book, “Who Let Them In?,” does an amazingly and painfully detailed job of explaining what path-breaking women in sports journalism went through and what women in sports journalism still go through.
The television element adds the issue of physical attractiveness to the topic at hand. You might get a heavy-set guy with the remnants of a bad teenage bout with acne on the screen, but you’re almost assuredly not going to see a woman of a similar description.
One of the first women to have a nationally prominent role on an NFL television program was Phyllis George, a former Miss America. Critics pointed out that George had limited television and sports experience, and was intended merely as eye candy for men. Unfortunately, as viewers got a heavy dose of female reporters on the sideline over the years, each of whom was “visually appealing,” the rap on these journalists became that anyone who could successfully rock a “Hooters” uniform could probably do the job.
The fact of the matter is that these journalists have to hustle harder than their counterparts in so many ways and be ready for almost anything. As some reports on this topic mentioned, when Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest on the field, the sideline reporters were the first and most direct line of communication to the public about his situation. When players are injured, when fights break out in the stands or when any other kind of bedlam takes place, these journalists are pushing for information and trying to keep the audiences informed.
When one person of a particular group (sideline reporters) breaks the code and kind of does it in a “oh, well, I’m not really a journalist anyway” kind of fashion, it hurts the remainder of the people in that group. That’s why you saw Laura Okmin, Andrea Kremer, Tracy Wolfson and dozens of other sideline reporters and female sports journalists coming out on social media to say, “We don’t make stuff up. Never. Don’t even think about it.”
Thompson’s actions and her disclosure in this fashion caused a great deal of harm to journalists who already have to work way too hard to be considered journalists at all, let alone equals of people who often have less journalism-based education and media training than they do. As we have seen in some of the other cases noted earlier, this is a firing offense and it should be.
The Filak Furlough Tour took a stop at Morgan State University, where we covered a couple of really great topics in two classes. Milton Kent, the professor there, was extremely nice to me after I screwed up the name of his student newspaper in a post I wrote a while back, so I wanted to make it up to him and his crew as best I could.
In one class, we talked about some reporting and writing stuff while in the other, we talked about editing, fact checking and such. It was such a great time that I forgot to grab a screen shot photo for this.
Oh, well. You’ll have to take my word that I actually wore a different shirt.
Onward…
MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY – Baltimore, Maryland
THE TOPIC: We went with a lot of Q and A in the first class, and we’ve kind of touched on a lot of that already, so we’re going with the second class a bit more, with the idea of how to edit and what to do.
THE BASICS: There are a couple key things that really help me when I need to edit something. The first one is particularly helpful when I am trying to edit something I wrote.
Write, get the heck away from it, come back, put on my “editor’s hat” and then go to work.
Editing right after you write something doesn’t tend to work that well in a lot of cases, particularly because you figure if you wrote it, you probably figured it was right in the first place. It’s also hard to edit right after you wrote it, at least it is for me, because my mind kind of “fills in” stuff that’s not there because I knew what I meant when I wrote it. That makes it harder to do a true word-by-word edit.
Getting away from the piece for a while can help you mentally reboot and come back at it with a fresh set of eyes. I also like to pretend a bit that this came from someone else, so I can be like, “OK, what the fresh hell is this?” Like most things when you’re working with writing and editing, you find little ways to make things work for you. Once you find them, stick with them.
A couple other tips I liked to use:
ASSUME EVERYTHING IS WRONG: One of the easiest ways to get something wrong is to assume everything is right and then only check on things that appear wrong. It’s a pretty standard thing editors who are strapped for time do. Editors who work with high-end pros a lot also tend to go this route, because you expect stuff to be right if the person is a high-end pro.
Me? I work with a lot of students and I’ve read a lot of things that, while outlandish, tend to be true. I’ve also read stuff that seemed to be logical, only to find the kids made it up. This kind of weird confluence of experiences has put me in t he position where I just assume everything is wrong and I have to go about proving it to be accurate.
For example, if a source said, “I got arrested in New York in 2004 for a string of burglaries and got sent to Smithton State Prison for 10 years. While I was there, more than 20 people got killed in prisoner on prisoner violence.” I’ve got a lot to look at:
Can I prove the guy got arrested and for what charges?
Can I prove the time and place of the arrest and conviction?
Can I prove he went where he said he went and for that amount of time?
Can I prove people got killed there and if so, can I prove the number of deaths?
The same thing is true of simple things like name spellings, ages, job titles and more. Assume it’s wrong and prove it right.
SINS OF OMISSION ARE VENIAL, SINS OF COMMISSION CAN BE MORTAL: Going along with what we talked about above, if I can’t prove something is right, I’m probably not going to use it. This isn’t always possible. I love going back to this argument in Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” where the main character (a fact-checker at a magazine) has a discussion with a notoriously sloppy writer:
“Where did you get this about the French government owning a controlling interest in Paramount Pictures?” you say.
“Don’t they? Well, shit. Run a line through that.”
“Your next three paragraphs depend on it.”
“Damn. Who told me that?”
In many cases, however, it’s easy enough to either check the fact and prove it so you can keep it in or check the fact and disprove it so you can cut it. If you can’t do either, it’s better to leave the thing out than to be wrong.
In writing, we talk about sins of omission and how they can undercut a piece. That’s true, but those sins, to borrow from my Catholic upbringing, are venial. You can be forgiven for not being as complete as you need to be. If you screw up because you guess wrong, those sins are mortal and you can pretty much kill a piece (or even your career).
WHEN YOU SCREW UP, ADMIT IT: Mistakes will happen. I think I make about 353,532 a day, and that’s when I’m only awake for 12 hours. The ones you put into the public sphere, however, can really damage your reputation among your peers and your audience.
The one thing I did when I talked to Milton Kent’s class was to apologize for screwing up the name of the school’s publication. I’d already fixed it on the blog weeks earlier and I made an email apology to Milton, but I wanted to let the kids know I was sorry as well. The goal was simple: Be a decent example.
It’s hard to feel OK about screwing up and it’s even harder to fess up when you make a mistake, but people tend to trust you more when you are honest and open about errors. Like most hockey goalies, even the best editors occasionally let one slip past them. There’s no shame in raising one’s hand and saying, “That’s on me.”
BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: What do you think of the situation with Hasan Minhaj and The New Yorker’s fact check of his comedy? He told some broader truths and after the piece questioned his accuracy, he did a video where he “brought the receipts” for what he said in his act. What’s your take on all this?
BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (plus an update): (When the student asked me this, I’d read the New Yorker piece, seen some response pieces and heard the Bill Maher bit on this concept of “emotional truth.” I had not actually seen Minhaj’s response video, which I did explain to the class. After watching it, I might have changed a couple things (which I’ll touch on after the main answer), but overall, I think the answer itself stands up.)
It felt kind of strange to me that a writer at The New Yorker would spend this kind of reporting capital on fact-checking a comedic routine. There did seem to be some problems with what he said in his comedy and the ramifications of those statements for other people.
(In one part of his comedy that was examined by the writer, Minhaj mentions that he tried to take a white girl to the prom, only to be turned away at her doorstep because her family didn’t want her in prom pictures with a “brown boy.” According to the story the girl (now woman) and her family caught a lot of online harassment for this, even though it didn’t happen in that way, and she ended up marrying another “brown boy” later in life. )
When you make up stuff and it negatively impacts real people, that’s not good, even if you’re doing it for comedic effect. Minhaj is operating in a world of comedy that’s different from the past days, as comedy and fact have become blurred. That means there is a greater risk when you bend the truth or play to broader issues with made-up examples.
Comics have always made up some parts of their act. The late Rodney Dangerfield notoriously made jokes about his wife cheating on him. (“When I come home, the parrot says, ‘Quick! Out the window!'” would be one of those.) While “Fat Albert” in Bill Cosby’s routine was based on a real person, there’s no real proof of people like “Mushmouth” or “Dumb Donald” existing. Richard Pryor, while turning significantly terrible aspects of his life into true comedy, did add elements to his comedy that didn’t exist or were untruthful.
(I’m not linking to any of Pryor’s stuff here, as I don’t want my editors at SAGE to have a heart attack. Speaking of which, one of Pryor’s go-to bits was about how his father died, which is both truth and fiction. If you look it up on YouTube, listen with headphones and don’t say I didn’t warn you…)
That said, those tweaks didn’t create significant negative impact for real people. If people had spray painted “WHORE!” on Dangerfield’s wife’s car or she got kicked out of her ladies at church because of his jokes, yeah, that’s something he’d need to answer for. If something terrible happened to “Fat Albert” because of Cosby’s comedy or significant harm happened because of Pryor’s tweaks to the truth, the same thing applies.
Here were two things that stuck out with me about the Minhaj situation:
First, I’m not doubting that he experienced negative things like the ones he mentioned in his comedy specials. The racism he discusses has been well documented in far too many facets of life for this to be viewed as just lies for the sake of a laugh. (Just like Pryor’s routine about being pulled over by the cops because someone “looked just like you” probably didn’t happen the way he said it in his routine, I have no doubt he and others experienced that kind of thing and that it was terrible.)
Using humor to draw attention to social inequality and similar issues has merits. I think Minhaj just “punched up” a few of his real examples to make the comedy better while trying to make a bigger point. (I often joke about 12 years of Catholic school and getting battered about by nuns. We did experience some significant smacking around and some emotional trauma from more than a few people, but it wasn’t all nuns and it wasn’t all the time.) Comedy creates awareness in some significant ways.
Second, I think that doing a deep dive on Minhaj just felt a little shady. There are hundreds of comics out there talking about “real things” that weren’t 100 percent verified. For the sake of the exercise, go through this Jeff Foxworthy routine about his “Cousin Sherry’s Wedding.”
I have no idea of Foxworthy has a cousin named Sherry. If he does, I have no idea if she actually had a “hurry up wedding” in his Uncle Wayne’s backyard. I also don’t know if she was 8 months pregnant when she got married or, as his mother supposedly said, “That’s the same dress her mother got married in.” I found it funny, regardless.
But we could take apart that routine or a dozen others about his family (“The Clampetts go to Maui” is a classic for this kind of analysis) in the same way The New Yorker went after Minhaj if we wanted. Dare I say, we probably wouldn’t, which probably points toward the racial inequity Minhaj was trying to raise more than anything else.
POST SCRIPT: After I got done with the class, I went to find the video the student referenced that I hadn’t seen. Minhaj does a 21-minute video where he picks apart the article and explains himself. He does apologize if he led anyone astray with his comedy, which I think is fair. I also think he’s probably more accurate than the New Yorker gave him credit for being. He “brought the receipts” in the form of emails, texts and other supporting evidence.
In most cases, he’s more right than wrong and where he did bend the truth, he made some solid explanations for why he did so. He also pointed to some of the spots where the article’s writer made choices that put a decided slant on how he was coming across. He’s not “emotional truthing” this thing to death, making claims that are untrue but feel like they should be. He realized some of the stuff he said could be a bit further out than maybe he intended initially, but he probably never figured someone would fact check him within an inch of his life.
If nothing else for me, this demonstrated the key principle I always try to push to my students: Before you make a decision, get all the facts you can.
BACKGROUND: Lillard joined the Bucks in the off-season from Portland in a blockbuster trade. His debut against the 76ers lived up to the hype, as he scored 39 points, grabbed eight rebounds and handed out four assists.
The problem is that people started figuring out this wasn’t legitimate, as the game was on TNT, so why was ESPN alone on this interview? Also, what was up with the weird pole thing? More detailed sleuths took issue with the fact the Bucks arena floor and Lillard’s jersey didn’t look right compared to the game footage they’d seen.
ESPN then issued a statement trying to explain away the fact they’d taken a video from the 2020 “Bubble Era,” removed TNT’s logo, PhotoShopped a Bucks jersey over Dame’s old Portland jersey and basically made stuff up:
“We occasionally look to connect sports moments of the past with contemporary imagery and storylines as part of our social content. While it was never our intention to misrepresent anything for fans, we completely recognize how this instance caused confusion.”
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE:
Uh-huh. SURE you didn’t mean to mislead people.
It’s hard to know the motivation of any one person and any one post, but this self-serving statement is total crap. That said, here’s the bigger problem: When you are the purveyor of actual content (games, SportsCenter, breaking news on athletes’ lives etc.), you are held to an actual ethical standard higher than that of a dipshit teen playing with an Instagram filter.
The spin that ESPN put on this thing about trying to “connect sports moments of the past with contemporary imagery” is laughable at best. If they had done something like a series of clips of Lillard over his career, with that audio over the top, fine. That’s at least “past meets present” (sort of).
But what they did was fabricate reality in a way that they KNEW would lead people to believe this was a contemporary moment, captured in its entirety by ESPN. (Also, what, exactly, was the need to PhotoShop out a competitor’s logo and PhotoShop in yours, if this was only an issue of trying to “connect sports moments?” Seems more like a cheater’s attempt at self-promotion to me.)
The ethical problems revealed by ESPN’s inexplicable lack of judgment are complex but illustrative of the battle currently being waged in sports media, and in news media overall.
First, there’s the problem of much of society seeing sports as entertainment, rather than news. If you justify sports as a space where people come to have fun — especially NBA Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, which is undefeated in terms of passionate fans who continually make hilarious memes and videos — then pretty much anything is ethical, right? After all, we’re all just having fun; no one thinks any of this is real.
And that’s very much the attitude had been many in the sports media space including, apparently, whoever green-lighted the Dame video at ESPN. And with the loss of shows that featured actual investigative reporting in sports, like ESPN’s Outside the Lines and HBO’s Real Sports, the space for real journalism in sports media continues to shrink.
In short, if you want people to take you seriously, you can’t do stupid crap that says, “Hey, we’re just screwing around with stuff for fun!”
DISCUSSION STARTER: What, if anything, should ESPN be doing in this arena?
Should it be making stuff up, but telling people enough to let them know it’s made up? Or will that just perpetuate a problem and keep sliding toward the line between journalism and fiction?
Should it get the heck out of this kind of “construction of reality,” in that it’s not ESPN’s gig, even if everyone else is doing it?
Should it find ways to use the digital technology that helped them do this in specific ways but not other ones?
Please consider these words of wisdom… If it would bring you here to UWO, Dr. McElroy, I would gladly perform the entirety of any scene from “Cool as Ice” for you every day, simply for your amusement.
Dear Dr. McElroy,
Even though we have never met, I have been following your situation from afar and find it depressingly untenable. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be recruited, lauded and praised by an institution you love and admire, only to have that place fold up on you like a cheap card table when the wind started blowing in another direction. I also can’t imagine what it’s like now trying to figure out where to go in life: You basically told your previous employer you were leaving, only to now realize you CAN’T leave for this other job.
This has to be twice as painful for you, as TAMU is your alma mater and that really seemed to be a driving force for you, based on what I read. (For me, I’d be pretty OK if I went back to one of my degree-granting institutions. The other one? I’d rather you stabbed me in the face with a live cattle prod than send me there for a faculty slot.)
This would be a comedy of errors if it weren’t so sad and tragic.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer you this plea: Drop those zeroes and get with the heroes here at UW-Oshkosh. We would LOVE to have you, and I personally would love to spend as much time learning from you as humanly possible.
Here’s the best case I can offer you for such a career move:
The person at UWO who would be your boss has been pretty darned good to journalism and student media. When a bunch of little… um… student government people demanded my head as the adviser of the student newspaper, he stepped in and kept the idiots at bay. He was also instrumental in our fundraising drive and even gave money out of his own pocket to help out.
In addition, our offices are in the newest academic building on campus, right down the hall from our African American studies department. “Doc” Simpson is an amazing leader of that department and Dr. Denae Powell is one of the coolest people I know. (If you like to laugh, we enjoy sharing a lot of “guess what a student just said/did” stories as we pass each other’s office on a daily basis.)
We’re a fun, small, collegial bunch and we take care of each other. We don’t silo up into “news” versus “PR” or whatever, and we really do our best to help each other and all of “our kids” that enter the program. Based on what I’ve read, that sounds like it would be right up your alley.
I grant you we aren’t perfect: We get 10 feet of snow every year, it takes a while to learn how to pass farming equipment on our highways and you can’t breathe within six inches of the Illinois border without being forced to pay a toll. We also have our share of knotheads who treat higher education as if it’s some sort of a Communist plot, which might not sound like much of an improvement over your current situation.
I also grant you that I don’t have fiat power in terms of offering you a job, but I’m a hell of a persistent cuss when it comes to getting important things done, so let’s figure that one out when we get there. I just think you’re too important and valuable to waste on an institution that’s treating you this way.
Feel free to shoot me a note via the contact form here if you’re interested in taking a chance on the Harvard of the Fox Valley.
A colleague who is advising a student media operation asked a question in an internet group setting after a kid on his staff admitted to fabricating a story for the publication:
Does anyone have any experience or policies to shed light on how such a person might be given a path to redemption?
The old editor in me says, “That’s it. Your journalism career is over.” But these days I see too many long-lasting severe consequences for young people who do dumb things, including criminal activity. TBH, I’m not really trying to open the philosophical debate here. I’m interested in options I can present to the student EIC, who will make the decision.
I thought about the question the guy was asking and put together what I thought was a pretty reasonable answer based on what he wanted to know: How do you give the kid a path to redemption? After I posted, several other folks chimed in with the idea that the kid SHOULDN’T get a path, given that this was likely not a one-off and that keeping the kid is borrowing trouble.
Truth be told, that’s actually the better instinct, based on a lot of things we’ve seen in the media world lately. We’ve covered this topic here and here and here where we had professional journalists get caught after years of making crap up. It’s never a one-time deal and the journalist’s whole career comes apart like when you pull a loose thread on a sweater once someone starts digging into the past.
The sad part was that the colleague updated us a couple days later:
Probably because of posts I’d read on this list about earlier situations, on Sunday I started emailing all the sources named in the reporter’s earlier stories. This morning, I started calling businesses where some of the sources allegedly worked. By lunchtime, there were several cases where no such person could be found to exist. After trying to come up with explanations for the first couple, the reporter finally admitted this had been a pattern. The reporter resigned.
This brings me to today’s throwback post, which looks at a similar situation involving a young reporter at USA Today. It’s not meant to “tsk tsk” people, but rather as a reminder, this kind of thing can happen to anyone in the right (or wrong) circumstances, so it is important to remain personally vigilant.
Whenever a situation like this comes up, I think back to the first episode of the Netflix show “Ozark” and the issue of how to deal with someone who has cheated. The main character is involved with a drug cartel in a money-laundering scheme out of Chicago.
Del, the connection south of the border, makes an unexpected visit, accusing the laundering crew of stealing from him. He tells a story about his father’s grocery store and how his dad spotted a loyal cashier (a woman so close to the family, you call her aunt, he remarks) stealing $5 from the till one day.
She begged for forgiveness, saying she needed the money for a child’s medicine and that she’d never do it again. Del then asks each of the four men in the operation what his father should have done. Three of the men say he should forgive her, give her a second chance. After all, one mistake after 15 years of loyalty? The three men are brutally killed shortly after that. The fourth, Marty, doesn’t answer, but he manages to worm his way out of getting killed.
Later, Del asks Marty question again:
As much as people want to believe something like this was just a one-off, it rarely turns out to be the case. After someone pulls on the first loose thread on sweater, others began to do so as well, and we see everything unravel.
The Gainesville Times, where Miranda worked for three months as a freelancer and a reporter, published a piece on her USA Today situation and audited her work. The paper stated it pulled only one story just to be on the safe side, noting Miranda had produced “only a small volume of work” for the publication.
Her college paper, the Red and Black at the University of Georgia began conducting its own audit of Miranda’s work after the USA Today situation came to light. That paper flagged 14 articles of concern of the 121 articles associated with Miranda. The publication then made the appropriate corrections or clarifications to six articles that didn’t pass muster after they were reexamined.
(If anyone wants to see perhaps the best example of transparency, thoroughness and honesty in the face of a potential disaster, read this write up on the Red and Black’s website that details the work the staff went through to address the problem. These folks essentially wrote the book on how to self-audit in a situation like this.)
To ask “why” is a pointless exercise. Each time a journalistic fraud emerges, we get a different story, none of which excuse the actions of the individual or fully satisfy the readers. It also provides us with an undeserved sense of superiority, as if “we” could never be capable of such a thing.
We all are.
Some of us deal with pressure better. Some of us grew up with a guilt complex. Some of us have a pathological fear of getting caught that keeps “bad things” in check for the most part.
But rest assured, not one of us is any less capable of cutting a corner or fudging a source. We just haven’t done it. Yet.
For journalists, journalism teachers and students who want to keep that demon at bay, go to the Red and Black and USA Today websites and look up the stories Miranda wrote in her brief journalism career. They are powerful, engaging and interesting pieces that run the gamut of social justice explorations to fun news features.
Now, just do a Google search on “Gabriela Miranda.”
Almost every link comes back to a story about her journalistic transgressions.
