Police accuse Bryan Kohberger of killing four in Idaho, while news outlets allow random acquaintances to accuse him of being weird and mean

(EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re still on break for a few weeks, but for those of you who go back early and are looking for a timely topic in a reporting class, this seemed to have some potential. We’ll return to the regular posting schedule in late January. — VFF)

In the race to fill in some important personal details about the man accused of killing four college students in Idaho, a few news outlets seem willing to let almost anyone step up to the microphone and call Bryan Kohberger an asshat:

Consider what ABC, a national media outlet, just did:

It relied on a first-name-only source, who was apparently interviewed over the phone, to provide “new details” about this guy.
It relied on “Thomas,” a former childhood friend, to provide key insights on a guy who is now 28 years old.
It then gave us the major insight that Kohberger was “mean” as a kid and apparently put “Thomas” into a headlock at some point.

The New York Times, which at least gave Thomas a last name, did similar digging into his life and strung together a series of random anecdotes that, when placed in the context of a guy accused of quadruple homicide, sound downright damning:

Jack Baylis, who became friends with Mr. Kohberger in eighth grade, said Mr. Kohberger had long been fascinated with why people acted the way they did and had seemed to enjoy his job as a security guard for the Pleasant Valley School District, where he worked for several years until 2021.

The last time Mr. Baylis saw Mr. Kohberger was in 2021, when they shot airsoft guns together in the Poconos. At the time, Mr. Baylis said, Mr. Kohberger drove a white Hyundai Elantra, the same model of car that the police in Moscow said had been spotted near the Idaho victims’ home on the night of the attacks.

Hmmm… the “he liked being a security guard and did gun stuff” accusation… where have we seen this kind of reporting before… Oh yeah! Now I remember!

Also, Hyundai sold more than 650,000 Elantras of the 2011-13 model that Kohberger drove, and a goodly number of them were probably white…

The Times then set about painting a picture of him through facts that essentially say, “Here’s some random crap we found. Feel free to make it feel as chilling as you want…”

At Washington State, Mr. Kohberger was continuing with his studies, his classmates said. B.K. Norton, who was in the same graduate program as Mr. Kohberger, said his quiet, intense demeanor had made some classmates uncomfortable.

That’s right… he was quiet… You have to watch out for the quiet ones… Especially the quiet ones that get loud and argue…

The fellow student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared that speaking publicly could jeopardize his safety, described Mr. Kohberger as the black sheep of the class, often taking contrarian viewpoints and sometimes getting into arguments with his peers, particularly women.

The classmate recalled one instance in which Mr. Kohberger began explaining a somewhat elementary criminology concept to a fellow doctoral student, who then accused him of “mansplaining.” A heated back-and-forth ensued and the doctoral student eventually stormed out of the classroom, he said.

Look, I love the people I went through the doctoral program with at Mizzou and still stay in touch with many of them more than 20 years later. That said, there were more than a few occasions in which we were spending all day, everyday with each other and it got to a point where I’m sure at least one or more of us felt like throwing a chair at one or more of the rest of us.

I probably even “mansplained” something, long before we had a term for that and just referred it as “being a dink.”

That said, students also had some key insights regarding Kohberger:

Mr. Kohberger was also a teaching assistant in a criminal law class during the fall semester, said Hayden Stinchfield, 20, one of the students in that class. He said that Mr. Kohberger often cast his eyes down while addressing the students, giving the impression that he was uncomfortable.

TA fails to make eye contact. How did investigators miss this? Also, why didn’t they study his pattern of grading for clues that he was likely to murder four people?

Students said Mr. Kohberger had a strong grasp of the subject matter but was a harsh grader, giving extensive critiques of assignments and then defending the lower marks when students complained as a group. Later in the fall, roughly around the time of the killings, Mr. Stinchfield said Mr. Kohberger seemed to start giving better grades, and the assignments that once had his feedback scrawled across every paragraph began coming back clean.

Apparently when you have just killed four people, it makes you less judgmental of your students, so A’s for everyone! It also apparently makes you “chattier” according to a fellow doctoral student that the New York Post managed to locate:

“Bryan seemed like he was on the knife’s edge between exhaustion and worn out and at the time it was extremely difficult to tell which was which,” he told the outlet.

But Kohberger’s behavior changed markedly after he allegedly killed Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Madison Mogen, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and her boyfriend Ethan Chapin, 20, on Nov. 13 in their off-campus home in Moscow, Idaho, Roberts said.

“He did seem to get a little chattier going into the later parts of the term,” the fellow criminal justice doctoral student told NewsNation.

“On the knife’s edge…” Even for the Post that was a bit much.

Still, this pales in comparison to the breathless game of “Six Degrees of Serial Killer Weirdness” that News Nation played in this report:

So, let me see if I follow this: You interviewed serial killer Dennis Rader’s daughter about her thoughts on Kohberger because Kohberger took undergrad classes from a professor who wrote extensively about her dad? Her insights include that she has no idea if Kohberger actually contacted her father, was influenced by her father, admired her father or otherwise thought twice about her father.

We could spend days here going through the incredibly insightful coverage from myriad news outlets that have managed to track down Kohberger’s dentist from first grade who always knew he was a bad seed because he failed to floss twice a day. Instead, consider this a reminder of the “the duty to report isn’t the same as the duty to publish” mantra journalists should rely upon when deciding how best to tell a story.

The giant pile of “friends,” “colleagues” and other people who showed up in news reports with tidbits about how Kohberger wasn’t the greatest guy they ever met can seem damning when presented in the context of his arrest on suspicion of killing four people. However, if you go back and watch “Judging Jewell,” you can see a similar pattern of storytelling and anecdote stacking. This is not to say Kohberger is innocent, but it’s not the job of journalists to say he’s guilty, either.

Here’s a good classroom exercise: Go through your own past and pick out several facts that if applied to a story about you being accused of a significant crime would look damning even if they aren’t. For example, here’s mine:

Worked the crime beat as a reporter and editor for several years, covering multiple homicides and multiple cases of violent crimes.
The student government at UW-Oshkosh formally petitioned the university to remove him from his role as adviser of the student newspaper.
Once considered writing a dissertation on famed serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer
Lived in Milwaukee during the time in which Dahmer was killing people and owns a copy of Dahmer’s police report
A student on a professor rating website said, “His friendliness can be manipulative” while another said “he expects way too much of his students.”

I’m sure I could go on, but I’m already worried about running into myself in a dark alley somewhere…

Says who? Sources lack value when they are unnamed and wrong

One of the first things we teach in reporting is that you need to find sources with knowledge of the topic you are covering and interview those people so you can tap into that knowledge for the betterment of your readers.

The next thing we teach students is that those sources need to be named. The rationale is that naming a source gives the readers a better sense of how much trust they should place in that source. It also prevents the source from being a weasel or saying things the source wouldn’t otherwise say.

In a previous post, we groused about the ways in which sports journalists tended to bend that rule frequently, relying instead on “sources” or “a source” or “people with knowledge of the situation.” After the post ran, several sports journalists and journalism profs took me to task over this criticism, noting that “if we didn’t give people anonymity, they wouldn’t talk to us” and “this is standard practice in this part of the field.”

My point was that a) this violates the basic ethical standards we outline for journalists and b) it can come back to bite you in the ass. Case in point, the Wisconsin Badger football team hired Cincinnati’s Luke Fickell as head coach, which meant that interim head coach and presumed favorite for the full-time job Jim Leonhard had a decision to make about his future. Leonhard could return to the team in another position or leave it and go elsewhere.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the state’s largest paper, led the coverage with this big scoop about Leonhard’s future on Saturday:

MADISON – Jim Leonhard has decided to return to Wisconsin in 2023 under new head coach Luke Fickell, likely as the team’s defensive coordinator.

Leonhard met with Fickell on Wednesday and took time to mull his options. Leonhard was expected to meet with the team Saturday to tell the players about his decision, according to a source.

Turns out, the writer was wrong, which the world found out about when Jim Leonhard took to Twitter on Tuesday to announce he was leaving the program:

It’s not just that the writer got the story wrong, which every journalist does from time to time. It’s HOW he got it wrong. It’s also what was and wasn’t noted in that first story.

In the original story, we don’t get a comment from Jim Leonhard saying he is staying or leaving. It doesn’t even say the writer attempted to contact Leonhard, or if Leonhard issued a “no comment,” or whatever. That would seem to be a basic journalism move. Instead, we have “a source” which could be anyone from former Athletic Director and program God Barry Alvarez to Mittens the Cat.

We also don’t get a confirmation from Fickell saying Leonhard was staying.

What we DO get is a large section of quoted material in which Fickell talks at length about telling Leonhard he needs to think it. This soliloquy is then followed by the writer then stepping in with the “Voice of God” to not only declare Leonhard was staying but to provide a judgment about Leonhard’s personal values:

“I told him,” Fickell said Monday: “‘You’ve got a lot of things to think about. You’ve got to figure out where you want to be in five years and where you want to be in 10 years. … That is going to help you to figure out where you want to be next year.’

“That’s not easy. There’s a lot of things we all have to be able to get over. It takes a special person in some ways to get over a lot of those things.

“I had a hard time with it. But I do believe it was the right thing for me and the way that I did it and went out about it and it helped me become who I am.

“But my way is not always the right way. It’s not the way for everybody else. But that is what it really comes down to. What is in your heart and what is in your mind?”

Leonhard has revealed that by deciding to stay at UW.

OK, so now that Leonhard ISN’T staying, what has this revealed, o’ wise and powerful seer of things to come? How shall we detail this declaration of heart and mind? Well, with a little more straightforward news and a little less personalized allegory:

MADISON – Jim Leonhard announced Tuesday night he will not return as Wisconsin’s defensive coordinator in 2023.

Leonhard plans to coach UW through the Guaranteed Rate Bowl, set for Dec. 27 in Phoenix.

“It has meant the world to me to be able to pour my heart and soul into the UW football program for the last seven years,” Leonhard wrote on Twitter. “After discussions with my family and Coach Fickell I will remain DC through the bowl game but will no longer be part of the staff after the conclusion of the 2022 season.

“It has been an honor to coach these young men and thank you to all the fans who supported us along the way.”

The writer also then does the “I’m not going to say I was wrong, but I have to correct the record” thing:

Sources told the Journal Sentinel last week they expected Leonhard to stay on in 2023.

First, this is weaksauce. You went from “LEONHARD IS A MAN OF PRINCIPLE AND GREATNESS WHO REVEALED TO ME THROUGH A KNOWING SOURCE HE IS STAYING HERE” to “they expected Leonhard to stay.” Second, we went from “a source” to “sources” somehow, which unless the Journal Sentinel owns one of these, I don’t see how it happened:

If you take nothing else from this, consider these key points:

Unnamed sources put you in the danger zone: Unless you get a name on it, you’re taking a risk. The degree to which you feel that risk is necessary is a personal one, but don’t be surprised when things go to hell in a speedboat.
Get it from the horse’s mouth, or at least try to: Don’t run off and think because one person (or cat) has confirmed something you desperately want to write about, you are done with the work. Take the extra steps and then show people how you took those steps.
Stay out of the story: You’re a journalist, not a soothsayer. Tell me what happened, tell me how we know it happened and keep your own personal declarations for the bar after work.

POST-SCRIPT: “Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone has come back to haunt me.” Full disclosure: I misspelled Leonhard’s name in the first draft of this and forgot the word former before Barry Alvarez in terms of being AD (I just think of him as eternally in that position of God of Wisconsin). This was the work of a stupid person, who operates without an editor and needs to occasionally be reminded not to be the asshat he accuses others of… (h/t to journalist Jason McMahon (whose name I actually made sure to look up) for the correction and the piece of humble pie.)

“I never wanted to make it about me:” Columnist Robert Feder’s reflections upon retirement and what his 40+ years in the field can teach you going forward

One of the best columnists I ever had the pleasure of working with, George Hesselberg, recently posted this item on social media about Chicago-area columnist Robert Feder’s retirement. Feder’s bio is extensive, but simply put, he covered radio and entertainment issues in the Windy City for more than 40 years, during a time of much upheaval in the area and in the profession.

Feder’s reflections on his work, approach, life and more have a ton of value for you as a beginning journalist, even if you never read one of his columns or don’t aspire to be a columnist. In his discussion, two key things hit me as being vital to being good at the job:

FOCUS ON THE NEEDS OF THE READERS: Feder talked at length about his duty to the beat, how he felt obligated to do the best job possible and how he wanted to earn the trust of the readers every time he wrote something. The one part that really drove that home was this chunk:

Readers and subscribers reached out constantly with questions, and they expected answers: “Why did WFMT go off the air for 10 minutes last night?” “When is that weekend weather person going to be back?” “Why did that radio station play the same song twice last night?” Believe me, I don’t carry all that information around in my head — and the answer was probably never going to be a news item for me — but trying to be helpful to individual readers was a big part of the responsibility that I felt.

Feder wanted to make sure he could answer those questions for the readers in a clear and immediate fashion. Despite having been the gray eminence of media columnists, he didn’t see these questions as beneath his attention. It’s not, “Look, dweeb, I’m trying to do a multi-source story here on the Federal regulations halting a multi-million dollar media merger. Who gives a crap that WBZR played “Hooked on A Feeling” by Blue Swede twice in a row?” He seemed to approach it more like, “Someone has a question in my area of expertise. I owe it to that person to answer it.”

This also attaches itself to another key point about audience-centricity: If the audience you serve is interested in something, it’s not a “nothing” story. I remember a lot of expose-style stories my students wrote at my various media adviser stops throughout my career, but the one story that really sticks out to me still was the time the student newspaper at Ball State wrote about something simple: Water cups.

Since the start of the newsroom’s collective memory, the food court below the office would allow anyone to come in and grab a plastic cup of ice water for free. Then, one day, when we dispatched a kid to get a tray’s worth of water for the room, the kid came back and said, “They charged me a dime a cup!” When a staffer called the food service people, the answer was, “Well, it’s always been that way,” which it hadn’t, and then another person up the food chain said, “Well, it’s just what we need to do,” without explaining how, when or why this decision was made.

A story in the paper got a lot of students to rail against this in person and online. Less than a week after we ran the story, water was once again free.

Did the story solve the conflict in the Middle East? No.

Did it cure cancer? No.

Did it matter to the readers? Yes, and that’s the goal of all good journalism.

Whether it’s quick blurb on how a squirrel’s decision to snack on a high-voltage line knocked a station off the air last night or when the weatherperson on channel 3 will return, if people want to know something, give it to them.

DECIDE WHO YOU WANT TO BE: Feder had a number of potential role models when he started, but it ended up kind of coming down to two columnists he discusses below:

Deeb was famous for his take-no-prisoners style. And it was enormously entertaining to read if he wasn’t writing about you. But every time you burn a bridge, you lose the opportunity for that person or that organization to trust you.

So you have to decide: Is it better to write something that makes you the center of attention? Or is it better to focus on the story? I never wanted to make it about me. I just wanted to get the goods and have the people trust me.

In that way, Kupcinet was much more my role model. It was never as important where Kup got his information as was the fact that it was coming from him. When Kup said something was happening, you believed it because you knew that he knew everybody. And I think taking that approach had a lot to do with the longevity of my career.

I would likely argue that in the end, he probably became his own version of Kup, blending those ideas of being an authority without being a jackass with his own personality and sense of how best to meet the needs of the audience. Many parts of a journalism career are formed over time, through experiences and based on reactions we receive from peers, colleagues and audience members. It’s less about being poured into a mold and coming out fully formed and more like being a statue chiseled out of marble.

In any case, it’s important to figure out how you want to approach your career and how you want to operate in it. A lot of people I know tell me that they find someone who was influential in a positive way and emulate that person. I tried to do that with Steve Lorenzo, my first journalism teacher, only to have him tell me not to do that. After that moment, I started working on the opposite side of the situation: I found experiences that were unnecessarily painful, editors who were completely terrible and other similar bad outcomes guided me to what I DIDN’T want to replicate. In many cases I’d think, “What would (NAME OF TERRIBLE EDITOR) do here?” and then I’d do the exact opposite.

In any case, the trick here is to make sure that you are being true to who you are and not trying to play a character to fit the parameters established by another individual. Be you and do it to the best of your ability. That’s what Feder did and it led to a hell of a career.

A modest proposal for fixing the UW-Oshkosh’s policy regarding source restriction when it comes to student media outlets

If you have been following the story of UW-Oshkosh and how its University Marketing and Communications department has forced student journalists to route all interview requests through its staff, the story continues later today. Chancellor Andrew Leavitt, Editor-In-Chief Cory Sparks, UW-Oshkosh’s head of marketing and communications Peggy Breister and several other interested parties are meeting this morning to discuss this situation and try to figure out how best to move forward. If hear how that meeting turns out, I’ll make sure to let you all know.

If you haven’t been following this saga over the past couple days, you’ll want to start here, with the post in which Breister, outlines how her department deals with student media. Breister was responding to a report from FIRE that said UMC was forcing students to go through her office for ALL interview requests to UWO personnel.

Breister denied that the school had a policy like that or that she ever vetted any questions from the student newspaper, The Advance-Titan, before they were given to potential sources.

The next post, linked here, shows that Breister lied about both of those things and that former staffers were willing to go on the record to detail how stringently Breister and her department tried to control information at UWO.

If you have the inclination, you can help with this situation by reaching out to the following people:

This is Chancellor Andrew Leavitt. He’s the head of UWO and a really all-around decent guy.

He prizes student press freedom and he was exceptionally helpful to me when I was advising the paper. I also know that he’s listening to people, as several folks have emailed him already and told me he was nice enough to respond to them.

His email is: leavitt@uwosh.edu

Please feel free to email him and explain to him why the approach UMC is taking here is problematic to you. Also, feel free to explain what you think the “best practices” should be for the relationship between UMC and student and/or all media.

This is Peggy Breister. She is the head of UMC at UWO and the person who wrote the emails I screen-shotted above.

Her email is: breistep@uwosh.edu

Please feel free to email her your thoughts about her approach to UMC, student media and other similar topics. Also, if you are displeased by her actions regarding the Advance-Titan, please feel free to respectfully explain how you think things should be handled in the future.

This is Cory Sparks. He is the current editor of the Advance-Titan and, in the interest of full disclosure, one of my students.

I’ve done my best to keep him out of the danger zone on any stupid thing I write on the blog and not ask him to comment on any of this, lest there be questions about entangling alliances.

That said, he and the A-T crew have been dealing with a lot of garbage these days because of this situation, so please feel free to email the kids at: atitan@uwosh.edu

Please let them know you’re supportive of their rights and that you are behind them.

In the mean time, I’m going to offer an unsolicited proposal for how best to make the UMC/A-T situation work so that both sides can get some work done and peacefully coexist.

Let’s start on the UMC side:

OPEN THE GATE, STOP THE GATEKEEPING: The first crucial thing to do is to unbottleneck the portal of information on the campus by eliminating UMC as a “must-stop shop” for all sources. Journalists, as noted in the earlier posts and basically every introductory reporting text ever written, work hard to build trust with sources and to create relationships with them. This whole approach of gatekeeping that provides only the sources UMC wants with ONLY the questions they vet in ONLY the timeline they see fit doesn’t jibe with the free and unfettered press elements of our Constitutional rights.

UMC can start by basically saying to the A-T, and any other journalist who wants to hear it, “You do you. If you want to go find sources on your own, contact people via whatever methods work for you both and work the field like the professionals you are, that’s cool by us. Go get ’em.” That’ll be a good first step to establishing trust and transparency.

OFFER SERVICES ON BOTH ENDS: The true goal of public relations practitioners is to facilitate relationships. That’s where the UMC should both start and stop, if the folks there want to be really successful. This means that the UMC folks should be there when a journalist needs an expert in the stock market or the situation in Ukraine or the history of UWO. When a journalist needs help, UMC has the ability to be an excellent matchmaker.

The same is true when sources want their stories told. Pitching stories to outside media outlets or developing content for publication on the university’s website can draw a lot of good attention for the students, faculty, staff and other folk at the university. That’s a great use of time, energy and skills to make UWO shine. Just knowing what some of my intro reporting kids are finding on the campus has given me some great insights as to some really cool things happening here that I’m sure folks would like to report in their media outlets.

PROVIDE TRAINING FOR POTENTIAL SOURCES: Here are two things I’ve heard from some weak UMC folks over the years as rationale behind their desire to control information or limit sources:

“If we let journalists wander around on campus, they might report on things that make the university look bad.”
“If we let anyone talk to journalists, who knows what those people will say?”

OK, well, for the first one, if you don’t want people to report things that make the university look bad, maybe fix the stuff that’s out there you fear people finding out about. This approach is akin to me locking the basement door because I’m afraid we’ll discover mold down there. The mold is either there or not, but it sure as hell isn’t going away just because we don’t see it.

Second, if you are really worried that people will have awkward conversations with journalists, try to help them feel more comfortable about talking to journalists. Again, avoiding something doesn’t tend to make things better.

Have a program with some professional folks (read: like our PR faculty) and give the UWO community the opportunity to get used to talking to other people about what’s going on. It’s not about keeping a lid on anything but about making it so these people are not putting everyone into a jam if they talk about stuff they don’t know about, get worried about saying the wrong thing (which usually leads to saying the wrong thing) or getting fired for talking to the press. The goal here is education so the right people can talk to reporters and deliver the most accurate message possible for the audience of the media outlets.

TAKE THE STAFF OFF THE LEASH: A couple things that bothered me in the emails I posted yesterday and in the conversations I had with former staffers was the idea that only a few people were strategically allowed to talk to the A-T on any given story. The folks who work, serve and learn here should all have the right to speak as they see fit. Of course, if they’re told “Don’t talk to the media,” they’re going to fear what could happen to them, even without an explicit penalty or threat.

(When my father or mother said, “Do something-or-other OR ELSE!” I was at least smart enough to know I didn’t want to know what the “or else” was. I have a feeling that’s where a lot of folks find themselves on this campus when told not to talk to the student journalists.)

Make a blanket statement to the campus community that they are free to talk to whomever they want without a papal blessing from UMC. If they choose to do so, there will be no harm and no foul that will befall them. If they feel uncomfortable about doing so, they can either get some advice from UMC, training through that future training program proposed above or beg off without concern. It’s their choice.

If the chancellor, the provost, the police chief or other “top dog” folk who are constantly running from pillar to post need UMC to help play matchmaker, that’s something that could be easily established and would make sense if need be. However, eliminate the blanket policy of nobody gets to talk to anybody without UMC’s say-so.

LEARN WHAT HILLS YOU ACTUALLY ARE WILLING TO DIE ON: The emails and the stories tell me that UMC personnel had no compunction about complaining vociferously about stories, headlines and other such things. Anyone has the right to complain about anything, really, as that’s also part of the free expression approach we are pushing on this blog.

That said, learn to let a few things go. Good grief, this is worse than when my mother-in-law was arguing with me over the importance of salted butter.

If there are true fact errors (The paper spells the chancellor’s name wrong, a professor is said to be “murdered” instead of “honored,” etc.), absolutely feel free to reach out with a “Hey, I just saw this and you might want to fix it.” Explain that you have no say over content whatsoever (because the law dictates that you have no say over content whatsoever) but that you wanted to let people know what’s up.

If it’s more nuanced, debatable, limited in scope or otherwise not that damned important, it’s worth understanding that every hill isn’t worth dying on. The more you complain about every little thing, the less likely people are to listen to you at all.

Let’s look at the A-T side:

ACCEPT THE RESPONSIBILITY: Perhaps one of the best experiences I ever had was when we took a group of student journalists to the Minnesota Twins game as part of a media convention. They were given a daily press pass and told by the PR staff there: “Batting practice starts at 4. You’re just like every other journalist here. Act accordingly.”

In a few cases, the students screwed up here and there with protocol and such, but for the most part, they made a reasonably good accounting of themselves. That’s what happens when you get responsibility and take it seriously, something I know the A-T staff (and every other student-media staff I’ve hung around with) understands.

Still, few things were more upsetting to my editors and fellow advisers over the years than when a staffer tripped over their own ego and fell on their ass, embarrassing the rest of us along with them. Editors realized that the more freedom they had to go get stuff, the more they had to be careful in training and reporter selection. Not every Johnny or Janie Freshman with an attitude and two clips from the Beaver County High School Tidbit could be sent to interview the chancellor or cover a shooting.

Knowing what I know about the A-T folks I’ve met, they know this and are more than capable of establishing this as a credo in the newsroom.

WORK WITH UMC: Working “with” someone means that there is shared understanding of goals, roles and equality. It’s two professionals, making a go of a relationship. This is what PR is all about and it’s what we teach here in the department.

When I worked cops and courts, I often met with a public information officer. We’d chat about things he thought were interesting and I’d ask questions about stories I had upcoming. If I needed something, I knew I could trust that person because we had a relationship that didn’t so much mirror the one in “Mommie Dearest.” I also worked with PIOs at the sheriff’s office, fire department and more in this same way.

The relationship between the paper and the PIOs wasn’t adversarial. It wasn’t a case of “us versus them.” It was the idea that, for the most part, we pretty much could agree that we wanted accurate information getting to the public in a way that was relevant, useful and interesting. Sure, we occasionally disagreed on how that was all supposed to work, but that’s what often happens in a relationship, so we worked it out.

ESTABLISH GROUND RULES: The key to working with UMC comes down understanding what the ground rules each side expects the other to play by. That’s a conversation the paper needs to start so there is no confusion about how this relationship is going to function.

One PR person at another university told me she would always answer my questions accurately and honestly. Then, she flat-out lied to me and when I caught her lying to me, her response was, “Well, in that situation, I decided it wasn’t something you should know.” That has the same internal logic as Amy telling me she’s never going to cheat on me and when I catch her in the act, she tells me, “Well, we’ve never had a pool boy before…”

Another person told me, “I’ll never lie to you, but I’m not going to tell you everything, either. That said, if you ask the right questions, I’ll always answer them honestly.” In other words, he wasn’t going to come out and tell me, “Hey, did you know the provost is running an ultimate bum-shock fight club in the basement of Academic Hall with homeless guys each weekend?” That said, if I knew enough of what was going on to ask him about that situation, he was going to tell me that it was happening. I got used to that.

The point is, you need to know how honest someone is going to be with you, and if what I’ve seen over the past couple days is an indication of where we stand, there’s going to need to be some serious bridge building on the UMC side of things. At this point, if Breister walked in to my office drenched to the bone and told me it was raining outside, I’d probably call at least six people and take a walk outdoors myself before believing it.

I have no idea if any of this helps, but I can’t imagine implementing any of it would make things any worse at this point.

In any case, we’re all pulling for you folks to get this thing done well. Have a great meeting.

Here is proof that UW-Oshkosh’s marketing department restricted the access student journalists had to interview subjects, and some ways you can help end this gatekeeping mess

I tried my best to give my university, the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and its head of University Marketing and Communications, Peggy Breister, every possible benefit of the doubt when it came to FIRE’s allegations that UMC was suppressing student journalism. The exact charges in FIRE’s article included the requirement that student journalists MUST contact UMC for ALL interviews with university personnel.

Breister said no such policy existed.

Breister lied to me. And here’s the proof.

She told students at the Advance-Titan, the university’s independent student newspaper, they MUST request interviews through UMC:

She short-stopped interview requests student journalists made to UWO personnel without talking to her first and demanded that all requests for interviews be routed through UMC.

In this instance, she also required that the questions be submitted in advance, something else she said never happened:

She leaned on the staff to make changes to published copy. In addition, as recently as this fall, she reiterated that the A-T MUST go through UMC for any interviews, stating it is a “required procedure” for reporters who wanted to interview UWO personnel:

These are just the emails I was provided through former A-T staffers who had graduated. I imagine there are more with similar messaging that I could find with a full open-records request.

In light of these revelations, today’s post is going to look at what has happened, what needs to happen next and how you can help fix this situation:

THE PAST

I reached out to a couple former staffers at the Advance-Titan for their recollections of working through UMC over the past two or three years, which is when I’m told this non-policy policy started to take shape.

Jack Tierney was the editor in chief for the A-T in the 2018-19 school year and said he had generally positive interactions with UMC during the earlier part of his tenure, noting “I always thought that working with Peggy was easy.” During the later part of his time at the A-T, he said UMC officials established a policy in which interview requests needed to go through them.

“That became a problem toward the end of my time with the paper,” Tierney said in an email interview. “Instead of having streamlined communication between officials and the paper, the messaging would be filtered through UMC. This would add time, hours or sometimes days between requesting for comment and getting an interview done, which is a problem when working on deadlines.”

By the fall semester of 2019, several A-T staff members noted they sensed a change in how UMC was interacting with the paper.

“There definitely was a shift in UMC’s approach to dealing with the A-T in Fall 2019, and it escalated early in Fall 2020,” former managing editor Joe Schulz said in an email. “My first year on staff, I don’t remember talking about how UMC would feel about a story or feeling that UMC had much of an impact on our work. By Fall 2019 and Spring 2020, it became clear that UMC really didn’t want us printing anything negative about the university.”

Carter Uslabar, the editor-in-chief from Jan. 2020 to May 2021, said UMC had clearly established criteria that required A-T staffers to use UMC as a portal to university sources.

“There definitely was a policy that we were supposed to go through UMC to get interviews,” he said in an email. “Peggy repeatedly demanded that we go through UMC to set them up. In one email from Peggy on Sept. 15, 2020, she said she told Joe Schulz that ‘A-T staff must work through UMC regarding any requests for interviews with staff.’ She also said we should contact her if we ‘don’t understand this,’ which I thought was kind of comically rude, like a Newspeak way of calling someone an idiot.”

Schulz said he remembered “swearing like a sailor in the newsroom” when the staff received Breister’s email that mandated all interview requests for UWO personnel go through UMC.

“It’s understandable to have a marketing person sit in on an interview with the chancellor, but making all interviews with staff go through UMC is ridiculous,” he said. “Direct communication with sources is key to building good relationships with sources and establishing a sense of mutual trust. Being able to directly communicate with staff enabled me to build relationships with professors that I otherwise wouldn’t have built. Having a rapport with sources is crucial to reporting.”

The ability to build rapport was also important to Uslabar, who said he thought going through UMC made the whole process of reaching sources feel “very impersonal.”

“The general feeling was that it was bogus, and that if we had to do that, it would make it exceedingly and unnecessarily difficult for us to do anything meaningful,” he said. “I think people mostly ignored it at first. I was particularly frustrated because this really hurt our ability to build rapport with sources in the university. A lot of these relationships were built by students dropping by during office hours or sending cold emails to staff, and now that was going to be mediated.”

Former managing editor Amber Brockman said the transition to this new policy also included frequent chastising from Breister.

“Before all this, we could just reach out straight to our sources and email them,” Brockman said in a phone interview. “We had no problem and we’d get an email back. Easy as pie. Then this thing started happening where Peggy started emailing us back instead and saying we had to work through her. In one case, the professor I emailed must have emailed (Breister), and Peggy scolded me for not going through her.”

Other former staffers, who asked not to be named, also noted emails getting intercepted or sources getting cold feet in talking to the paper after UMC rebuked them for talking to the A-T. One former reporter said she was working on a story in 2020 about custodial staff and what precautions existed for them as they sanitized the campus during the pandemic when UMC stepped in.

“I had four interviews with custodial staff already set up when they all turned around and told me they weren’t allowed to give interviews,” the former staffer wrote in an email. “Breister then emailed me saying reaching out to those staff was against policy and I was only allowed to talk to their supervisor. I had to vet my questions with Breister to get a response and I only ended up getting a brief statement from the supervisor saying UWO was doing its best to keep its custodial staff safe. This completely impeded my ability to be a quality journalist and essentially shut down the story. It was stuff like this that continually kept A-T staff out of key COVID-19 responses the university was taking.”

Uslabar also said not only was the policy that all interviews must go through UMC problematic for getting the news covered, but the department’s overreaching approach to what the A-T covered made him leery.

“It was disappointing that we were being told to go through UMC for interviews,” he said. “It made things slower for students and staff, and made it more difficult to work on a deadline. Additionally, it was concerning because the paper has always had trouble receiving adequate funding, and I was worried that if we ran coverage critical of the university or its administrators, our paper would receive even less funding in the future.”

Although all of the sources interviewed here said that neither Breister nor UMC issued any direct threats to funding, Schulz said the paper felt the department was looming large in staff discussions in an uncomfortable way.

“We received several somewhat demeaning emails regarding our coverage, and UMC became a regular topic of discussion at our meetings,” he said. “It was always a fear that UMC would cross a line that would make it impossible to do our jobs. It didn’t reach that point during my time at the A-T, but we did have those fears.”

Tierney said UMC’s actions did lead to at least one story being censored. After Breister reached out to him to complain of what she called a series of inaccuracies, he and journalism Chairwoman Sara Hansen scoured a story, looking to see how what Tierney wrote was different from what Breister was telling them.

(In a separate discussion, Hansen confirmed working with Tierney as he explained. She also said she found the paper had quoted Breister accurately, but Breister continued to argue that the paper had incorrectly stated the facts.)

“After working together for nearly an hour to get the story to a place where Dr. Hansen and I felt was accurate, the A-T re-published the story,” Tierney said. “UMC reached out to the A-T after re-publishing and said they found more errors than what was originally published. The story was about a funding change to the college of letters and science with opposition to the change from the faculty union. After continued messaging from Breister about the noted inaccuracies of the story, we decided to pull the story entirely. I followed the story for the remainder of the year without publishing anything about it.”

THE PRESENT

The student journalists at the Advance-Titan continue to operate under a system in which all interviews of UWO personnel must go through UMC. Uslabar said he felt UMC was more concerned with the university’s image than treating student journalists with dignity and respect.

“The way UMC interacted with student journalists was shameful,” he said. “The pedantic, all-bold email I received from Peggy was the most unprofessional communication I have ever seen, and it was clear that the university and UMC were more concerned with controlling its appearance than providing real learning opportunities for students.”

Tierney said he understands that the goal of UMC is to present a positive image of the university, but the press still has rights.

“I think this situation shows a university using its leverage to maintain its image,” he said. “I have respect for the university and the people who lead the university, but I think it is clear the university is hyper-concerned about the message that gets put out into the public and does not like to have any negative communications surrounding its image. I think this issue reflects larger on the university than it does on Peggy or UMC.”

The fact the policy has gotten to this point has upset former staffers, who didn’t like the intrusive nature of the process and the way in which this has all kind of flown under the radar to this point.

“I think student reporters at the A-T should be able to talk directly to their sources without being filtered through UMC,” Brockman said. “I can see where UMC is needed for busy people like the chancellor and other people who need more schedule-conflict help, but they shouldn’t be the middleman with all the communication.”

In the wake of the FIRE article, Chancellor Andrew Leavitt and Editor-In-Chief Cory Sparks connected to discuss the situation. Leavitt, Sparks, Breister, adviser Barb Benish and several other folks plan to meet on Thursday on this topic.

“I’m glad this is getting some attention and hopefully something will be able to happen,” Brockman said.

As an alumnus, Schulz said he plans to keep an eye on the situation, hopeful that this issue gets resolved in a way that protects the autonomy of the paper.

“I sincerely hope the policy is changed to give student journalists and UWO employees the freedom to speak to each other without marketing interference,” he said. “I can’t imagine having all interviews go through UMC. In covering any community, whether a campus community, a big city or a small town, more often than not most news stories will be a positive reflection of that community. However, local reporters — at any level — should not fear that negative stories will hamper their ability to do their jobs moving forward.”

HOW YOU CAN HELP

The whole group meets on Thursday, where I’m sure some of these issues will likely be discussed. This situation isn’t as bleak as it might seem and there is something you can do to help:

This is Chancellor Andrew Leavitt. He’s the head of UWO and a really all-around decent guy.

He prizes student press freedom and he was exceptionally helpful to me when I was advising the paper. At that time, a group of little… um… student government people tried to get me fired. It would have been much simpler for him if he just did it, but he told me, “That’s not how we do business here.”

He told me on multiple occasions he appreciates the importance of the paper to the campus and I believe that he honestly believes that.

His email is: leavitt@uwosh.edu

This is Peggy Breister. She is the head of UMC at UWO and the person who wrote the emails I screen-shotted above.

Her email is: breistep@uwosh.edu

This is Cory Sparks. He is the current editor of the Advance-Titan and, in the interest of full disclosure, one of my students.

I’ve done my best to keep him out of the danger zone on any stupid thing I write on the blog and not ask him to comment on any of this, lest there be questions about entangling alliances.

That said, he and the A-T crew have been dealing with a lot of garbage these days because of this situation, so please feel free to email the kids at: atitan@uwosh.edu

Please let them know you’re supportive of their rights and that you are behind them. I can speak from experience in this one case: When you’re in student media, you are isolated in a lot of ways, since there is usually only one paper or one TV station or one radio station on a campus. You can feel alone or that no one cares about what you’re dealing with.

Please disabuse them of that notion with a note of support.

Throwback Thursday: Ruth Shalit Barrett might not know facts or ethics, but she knows chutzpah

After being called out for fabricating multiple parts of a story in The Atlantic, Ruth Shalit Barrett did the only logical thing she could think of: She sued the publication for defamation:

The Atlantic, in a nearly 1,000-word editor’s note, said that its fact-checking department had gone through the piece and spoken with more than 40 sources, but that Ms. Barrett had misled the fact checkers and lied to the editors.

“It is impossible for us to vouch for the accuracy of this article,” the note said.

In the lawsuit, Ms. Barrett also accused The Atlantic of misrepresenting her background and destroying her journalistic career through what it publicly said about her.

Ms. Barrett was a rising star in political journalism in the 1990s, when she was in her 20s and wrote under her maiden name Ruth Shalit. She was accused of plagiarism in 1994 and 1995 over several passages and sentences in some of her work that resembled the work of other journalists. She left her job at The New Republic in 1999, and has had few articles published in the last 20 years.

The Atlantic said in the editor’s note that it had originally used the byline “Ruth S. Barrett” at Ms. Barrett’s request “but in the interest of transparency, we should have included the name that she used as her byline in the 1990s.” The note said that Ms. Barrett had been assigned the story because “more than two decades separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic” but that editors regretted the decision.

For Throwback Thursday, here’s a look at the original piece we did on the blog when the story about her story broke back in 2020:

Four common threads associated with journalism malfeasance: A look at Ruth Shalit Barrett’s fraudulent story for The Atlantic

There’s a pretty good reason why people constantly scream that the media is full of “fake news” get traction on their arguments:

Two weeks after publishing a long, juicy and instantly viral story about the world of competitive niche sports, and the wealthy parents who push their children to play them, the Atlantic on late Friday appended a nearly 800-word editor’s note informing readers that it was “deceived” by the story’s author, Ruth Shalit Barrett.

By Sunday evening, the magazine had gone further, announcing that it had retracted the story altogether. “We cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author,” an expanded editor’s note said, “and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the article.”

This wasn’t the author’s first scrape with journalistic malpractice. In the 1990s, she worked at The New Republic where she was fired for plagiarism and taking liberties with her copy. As she noted for this story, written shortly after her dismissal, she was there alongside fellow journalism pariah Stephen Glass, who fabricated multiple stories and faked large portions of others:

“Steve Glass was boring, a boring fabulist, the Milli Vanilli of journalism. There were all these sorts of pieces written about how he was this brilliant, misunderstood genius who was hemmed in by the literature of fact. I think that’s wrong, that the appeal of his pieces was that they were supposedly full of all this great reporting. If you go back and read these pieces knowing that it was all made up, they don’t seem fun anymore,” she says.

“When people started writing pieces about Steve Glass, it all sort of got thinned out….It was ‘Steve Glass, fabulist’ and ‘Ruth Shalit, plagiarist.’ The rest of who I was and what I had done got dumped. And that was a drag, because if you stand back, there are good pieces with solid reporting, and that are true, by the way. To equate that body of work to the work of another writer whose entire oeuvre turned out to be this tissue of lies, that seems to be a large leap,” she says.

Leaping forward to her current situation, The Atlantic went to cringe-inducingly painful lengths to lay out the sins of the author and the magazine’s role in letting it see the light of day. In an editor’s note that retracted the piece, The Atlantic noted the following problems with the story:

The main character was given the name of “Sloane,” Barrett said, to protect the anonymity of this stay-at-home mother with three daughters and a son. It turned out to be the source’s middle name, which made it easy for people to identify her. In addition, the woman didn’t actually have a son.
In the deeper dig, “Sloane” explained that Barrett suggested the invention of the fictional son, and then told her to lie about his existence when contacted by The Atlantic’s fact checkers. At first, Barrett denied knowing about this before fessing up later.
The wounds that “Sloane’s” daughter sustained during a fencing competition were false or extremely exaggerated. In one case, Barrett described a piercing throat wound that struck the jugular vein and nearly hit the carotid artery as “a Fourth of July massacre.” The wound didn’t even draw blood, as noted by witnesses who posted on social media. A second wound was described as a deep thigh gash, which it was not, the correction notes.
A family involved in lacrosse was identified as living in the wrong city in Connecticut.
A statement that some families had built Olympic-sized ice rinks in their backyards had to be corrected to merely state that private ice rinks were constructed. (Olympic rinks measure 200 feet by 100 feet, which approaches nearly a half acre of space.)

As these falsehoods and errors began to crop up, the folks at The Atlantic acted like trauma surgeons in a disaster: They kept tying off bleeders and trying to keep the patient alive. The editor’s note lists two dates in which the magazine added corrective information to the story, before making the decision to finally pull it. (A PDF of the article is still available on the magazine’s website.)

Simply put, they didn’t know how deep the rot really was, but they knew the author had purposefully lied to them:

Our fact-checking department thoroughly checked this piece, speaking with more than 40 sources and independently corroborating information. But we now know that the author misled our fact-checkers, lied to our editors, and is accused of inducing at least one source to lie to our fact-checking department. We believe that these actions fatally undermined the effectiveness of the fact-checking process. It is impossible for us to vouch for the accuracy of this article. This is what necessitates a full retraction. We apologize to our readers.

We have talked at length about a number of these situations, such as journalist Mike Ward’s use of fabricated “real people” across multiple stories,

Historically, there is always the “Jimmy” story that Janet Cooke wrote, in which she told the tale of an 8-year-old heroin addict who turned out to be a fabrication. There is Jayson Blair, who fabricated sources, lied about information he supposedly got from sources and plagiarized the work of other journalists. The New York Times ran a correction of around 7,000 words, in an attempt to fix all of the problems Blair caused and restore some of the paper’s credibility.

Heck, Barrett’s former colleague at The New Republic, Stephen Glass, fabricated content to the point he was portrayed by Darth Vader in a movie.

If you’re looking for a lesson here, the “no duh” one would be not to do this kind of stupid crap, as it is likely to lead to your demise as a journalist while cratering the credibility of every media outlet you ever touched.

If you’re looking for a more oblique lesson, it’s that journalists (and journalism educators, for that matter) are trained to be skeptical pit bulls. We dig into stuff and if we find out you lied, we will burn you so badly you will wish you had died as a child. The Barrett piece started to lose air once outside publications, like Erik Wemple’s blog, began picking at it.

Beyond those two things, consider a few basic observations I’ve come up with about the Barrett situation and some of the previous cheating scandals:

It’s rarely a one-time thing: In the movie version of “Shattered Glass,” New Republic editor Chuck Lane is faced with one piece of copy that he knows is false. The whole story of Ian Restil, a teenage computer hacker, is on the radar of Forbes Digital Tool and reporter Adam Pennenberg. Pennenberg has poked enough holes into this thing to make Lane suspicious and his interactions with Glass confirm it.

The scene that sticks out to me is when Lane finally suspends Glass and is walking past the wall of past issues of TNR. He pauses and you can almost hear the gerbil in his brain hopping onto the treadmill.

He pulls down each issue, flips to the Glass piece in it and starts to read. One by one, he hits something that just doesn’t jibe with reality. He suddenly figures out that this guy has been doing this forever. In the end, 27 of the 41 stories Glass wrote were either partially or entirely fabricated, the movie notes in its epilogue.

This tracks with what you see in the Blair story, where he had been making stuff up and stealing from people for years. His college newspaper, The Diamondback, had issues with him and a retrospective on his tenure at the paper noted people at the time were concerned with his content.

In Barrett’s case, the problems existed decades apart, but they fit this mold.

It’s usually for unimportant crap: My buddy Fred Vultee, a long-time copy editor and now professor at Wayne State University, used to say that you can drown just as easily in two inches of water as you can in the Atlantic Ocean. His point was that the big stories aren’t the only places where disasters occur, but we can screw up just as badly in some of the tiny bits of copy we write as a matter of course.

I find this analogy is pretty applicable here as well, because in most of the cases involving plagiarism or fabrication didn’t do great and mighty things in a journalism sense. In most cases, these fabrications involved some really stupid and tiny things, especially compared to the risk of damage associated with them.

Mike Ward’s actions fit this to a T. He used official sources and their real quotes for the meat and potatoes of his pieces. However, he made up “regular people” and their thoughts out of whole cloth to provide that “spice” in the story. As I mentioned at the time, I get that it’s not a lot of fun to go find those “salt-of-the-earth, real people” at the Waffle House and ask them what they think of a pandemic or something. However, it’s part of the job and if you can’t do it, the very least you should do is avoid faking it.

Glass did “color” pieces, something that’s pretty clear if you review his list of articles. He said he claimed to be a biting expert after Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield and he got a radio station to put him on a talk show where he took calls for almost an hour. He said he spent time hanging out with drunk and stoned young Republican turks at the CPAC convention, who sought a “real heifer” of a girl to sexually assault. (“Bad acne would be a plus,” his source was quoted as saying.) He claimed to spend time with bond traders who had to pee in specially made urinals to keep them trading instead of heading to the bathroom. On and on these tales went, each more fantastical than the previous one.

None of it was true, but even more, none of it was necessary. It wasn’t like he was Gary Webb, tracking allegations of a CIA-fueled crack epidemic. He wasn’t trying to get information on the Son of Sam by posing as a bereavement counselor and interviewing a victim’s family. If there had been a kid named Ian Restil who hacked a company named Jukt Micronics, would it have been crucial for everyone to know it? Not really.

A rare exception to this was Blair’s work on the D.C. Sniper case, where he wrote various false claims, including an allegation that authorities found a grape stem at the scene of one of the attacks with shooter Lee Boyd Malvo’s DNA on it.

Overall, however cost-benefit analysis these people took seemed to be all out of whack when it came to what they were doing and what would be added to the sum of human knowledge. What it seemed to do, based on what they’ve said over the years, is fed their egos in some prurient way, which they put above their responsibility to their readers.

Fellow journalists generally have a “Spidey sense” about these folks before the situation blows up: There are moments in which people around the fraudulent journalists get a “feeling” that something isn’t right. In Blair’s case, there were warning signals all over hell and creation. A group of alumni from The Diamondback sent a letter to the J-school at Maryland after things blew up, outlining all the red flags they saw years earlier. Journalist Seth Mnookin’s book, “Hard News,” outlines the various editors at the New York Times who had huge concerns with Blair before he started “breaking” sniper stories.

The New Republic got complaints about Glass and his stories, noting errors or flat-out falsehoods. As he continued to deepen his fraud, he told a “60 Minutes” interviewer that he got fewer complaints because he was telling entirely fictional stories and that fake people don’t phone the boss.

In Barrett’s case, The Atlantic knew full well that she had a shady past, but the folks who hired her for this piece kind of squinted their way past this, noting her indiscretions were decades earlier and that people can change. Instead, they saw her kick up her malfeasance a notch from plagiarism to flat-out fraud.

Listening to that internal voice that says, “Something’s not right here…” isn’t easy for a number of reasons. First, it’s tough for a lot of journalists to imagine that one of our own would do something like this. It’s antithetical to who we are and what our profession espouses, so thinking this could happen is really hard to swallow.

Second, we are used to hearing crap like this from all sorts of people. Sources who said something might end up getting in trouble once the comment is published, so they call up and claim they never said it. When other reporters complain about the “star” reporter, it can come across like sour grapes. Thus, grousing that this guy or that gal is cutting corners or not fact checking or being a dink can be easily dismissed.

Finally, we can talk ourselves out of this “feeling” pretty easily for a number of reasons. In some cases, it’s because everyone is moving at warp speed covering the news, so we just figure it was a glitch or a “one-off” moment. In other cases, we realize that we’re about to accuse someone of something pretty egregious, so we better be damned sure. In most of these cases, these journalists exploited those weaknesses and continue to do their worst.

The dirt never washes off: Not every faker becomes a household name, but those who have done it and gotten caught tend to find their actions essentially ruin their lives. Outside of a couple interviews on a TV talk show and Mike Sager’s piece in CJR, Cooke has been actively out of communication for decades. Pieces often talk ABOUT her, but rarely, if ever, does anyone manage to talk with her. What could have been an incredible journalism career turned to dust.

Glass spent years going through law school, graduating in 2000 from Georgetown, but is unable to practice law, due to his problems as a journalist. He was able to get work with multiple law firms, but he is not an attorney.

Blair’s career was like a bottle rocket, streaking up through the sky quickly and exploding just as suddenly. In speaking with students at Maryland in 2016, he essentially admitted he harmed himself and the profession to the degree he knows he’d never be able to work in the field again.

Barrett got what all three of those folks, and many others, I would imagine, desperately want: A second chance. She took it and blew it. The “how” is easy to understand.

The “why?” Not so much.

Throwback Thursday: Ethics versus Access: An interview with the Chapman Panther editor who said, “No Thanks” to covering George W. Bush’s private event on the campus

Over the past couple weeks, we’ve seen big-name journalists brought under scrutiny for potential ethical lapses.

We looked at Adam Schefter’s situation earlier, in which he provided a source with a complete copy of a story prior to publication, asking if that person wanted anything “added, changed or tweaked” before it went live. A number of people castigated him for this choice, with some arguing that he’s essentially an “access merchant,” trading journalism tenets for scoops.

More recently, it came to light that Katie Couric went out of her way to “protect” late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she published a story about the SCOTUS icon back in 2016:

Katie Couric has admitted to ‘protecting’ Ruth Bader Ginsburg from public backlash by cutting out negative comments she made about people who kneel during the national anthem.

The former Today show host reveals in her new book that she let her personal political views influence her editing decisions after her interview with the late Supreme Court justice in 2016.

In new memoir, Going There, Couric writes that she edited out a part where Ginsburg said that those who kneel during the national anthem are showing ‘contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.’

The published story, which Couric wrote for Yahoo! News in 2016, did include quotes from Ginsburg saying refusing to stand for the anthem was ‘dumb and disrespectful’, but omitted more problematic remarks.

In light of these transgressions, I went back and found a case of someone taking the high road for the right reasons. Back in 2019, I interviewed Louisa Marshall, then the editor of the Chapman Panther, who took the step of declining a major interviewing opportunity with a former president because of conditions imposed upon their access.

The student journalists at the Panther explained how they didn’t want to trade press freedom for a good story or give their fellow students a reason to think the paper wasn’t an independent voice beholden only to the audience.

It’s stuff like this that always allows me to tell people who fret about the future of journalism that we’re probably going to be just fine.

Enjoy.

Ethics versus Access: An interview with the Chapman Panther editor who said, “No Thanks” to covering George W. Bush’s private event on the campus

When former President George W. Bush came to Chapman University this month to speak at a private event, administrators gave the staff of the student newspaper the chance of a lifetime: You will be the only press allowed to cover the event.

The staff unanimously agreed to turn it down, prioritizing ethics over access, and explaining the paper’s position in an editorial to its readership last week. Things got even more complicated this week, when the staff found out that it had essentially been lied to about who was attempting to restrict the paper’s access and why.

Courtesy of Kali Hoffman, Panther Photo Editor.

“It was a difficult decision because we worked so hard to get access,” Panther Editor in Chief Louisa Marshall said in an interview late last week. “We sat on it for a while and we came to the conclusion that even though we could be in the same room as a former president and that was a big deal, we couldn’t do this. We knew this was a rare event, but we also knew that we had talked a lot about journalistic ethics. We wrote our first editorial of the year on this, so that set what we were going to uphold.”

Bush came to campus as part of the 20th anniversary festivities that surrounded the naming of the business school. The namesake of the school, George Argyros, was a longtime friend of the Bush family. The events included a cocktail reception that preceded a private dinner and a one-on-one interview between Bush and Argyros’ wife, Julianne. The former president was also honored with a global citizen medal.

The university agreed to let the paper cover the event on three conditions:

No photographer was allowed.
No one was allowed to record the event.
Bush’s people would have to approve everything the Panther had planned to run before it published anything.

“I was a little disappointed, obviously, but it was also not something I was willing to bend our ethics over,” Marshall said.

“Bending the rules sets a bad precedent and for us to stake our overall tone for the semester on ethics and then agree to this,” she added. “You have to be able to practice what you preach.”

Marshall said she took the news back to the staff and sought input as to what was the best way to approach this situation. On one hand, the students had the scoop most college papers would kill for: A true exclusive with a former president of the United States.

On the other hand, submitting their work for prior review and prior restraint meant that they were allowing a source to censor content, thus undermining the whole idea of telling the campus what had actually happened at the event. Even more, it would call into question the entire truthfulness of the article and maybe even the paper.

“We sat on it for a while, ruminating on what we were going to do and what we were comfortable with,” she said. “We decided not to go.”

“There is a certain level of fearlessness that comes with student journalism overall,” she added. “I think I would really stress to someone wanting to be in student media that even though we’re all young and ambitious, we have to cover our bases. The whole aspect of maintaining integrity is to maintain well-rounded reporting. It’s walking an interesting line.”

Instead of taking the deal, the paper published an editorial that explained exactly why it was they weren’t going, what the university tried to make them do to get access and how they felt this was a better way to go.

After the “fit hit the shan” and everyone seemed to pile on Chapman about censorship, the university began backtracking faster than an NFL corner back and “clarifying” more than Windex. The truth of the matter was that Bush’s people had no problem with the paper doing anything and couldn’t care less about reading the story before it went to press. Instead, it was the university that wanted to get a handle on the paper and manage the school’s image at the cost of a free press.

“The Panther found out that the prior review condition was from the university, not Bush’s office, after I got in contact with Bush’s office,” Marshall said in an email this morning. “I asked about the prior review condition and they gave me an answer that was not in line with what the university had previously told me.”

In short, the students called out a former president for an action he had nothing to do with because the university lied to them.

In an editorial published Sunday, the paper was having none of this “Oh, you kids… you just didn’t understand things with your tiny kid brains” BS:

It’ll be very easy to review this entire situation and blame it on a misunderstanding. Undoubtedly, people will claim that there was some miscommunication along the line, that words and blame got pinned on the wrong person, that Chapman meant no harm.

That’s not the case. We didn’t misunderstand anything. We didn’t misinterpret anything. We were told that it was Bush’s office, not Chapman that wanted us to break our commitment to journalistic integrity. Regardless of any sort of miscommunication, that’s what happened.

“A whole part of journalism is to investigate and to question,” she said Monday in an email. “Although the message was communicated to The Panther from Chapman that President Bush’s office was requiring prior review, we took the steps to verify it. The fact that it was the university’s want for prior review and not President Bush’s staff -and that this information was not accurately communicated to us- is disheartening, as we would like to think that the university would be behind our efforts to cover events on campus with integrity.”

Marshall said this was the first negative encounter she has had like this with Chapman’s PR department.

“In my time at The Panther, this has never happened before,” she wrote. “As much as I have believed and continue to believe that administration will work to the best of their ability and maintain a positive relationship with The Panther, this will make me verify what the school directly tells The Panther from now on.”

Marshall said last week she understands that some people would have preferred the paper just agree and cover whatever it could. However, she said the ethical standards of the paper mattered more than a single story.

“Journalistic ethics is something that I’m personally attached to and very married to,” she said. “It’s something that guided my career especially since people in the field have been pained with an un-credible brush. I think in our climate right now, journalistic integrity is something I want to uphold to any kind of extent.”

It was much easier to uphold those standards, thanks to the team of staffers at the Panther, Marshall said. The students worked together on the decision to decline the invitation, run the editorial and then cover the event like any other media outlet.

“It’s a hard line to walk at times between knowing what you’re giving up but also what you’re maintaining…” she said. “I’m so lucky to be with my team. The level of reporting and writing… none of this would be possible without them.”

Marshall graduates in May with a degree in history and a poli sci minor. She has worked at several publications as an intern and said that a lot of what she has learned both as a student journalist and in these other opportunities helped shape her ethical code.

“I would like people and student journalists to know that it’s OK to question the information that you’re provided with; that, in essence, is really why we’re journalists, to investigate and to question,” she said. “As a student, you’d like to think that you can trust what your school tells you. This has not been the case in this situation, but it’s a good lesson to learn early on.”

Most of the sports reporters condemning Adam Schefter for violating the basic tenets of journalism are adorable hypocrites

ESPN’s Adam Schefter found himself in hot water last week after journalists kept digging through emails procured during the Jon Gruden debacle and found that Schefter was a little too close for comfort with a source:

In one of them from July 2011, ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter sent Allen the draft of an unpublished story that was published later the same day.

“Please let me know if you see anything that should be added, changed, tweaked,” Schefter wrote. “Thanks, Mr. Editor, for that and the trust. Plan to file this to espn about 6 am ….”

ESPN released the following statement in response to the correspondence: “Without sharing all the specifics of the reporter’s process for a story from 10 years ago during the NFL lockout, we believe that nothing is more important to Adam and ESPN than providing fans the most accurate, fair and complete story.”

Schefter released a statement Wednesday saying it was rare for him to send a story to a source in advance of publication and he did so because of the “complex nature of collective bargaining talks.” He added, “In no way did I, or would I, cede editorial control or hand over final say about a story to anyone, ever.”

The overwhelming consensus in Schefter situation is that sharing a complete story with a source is a violation of the most basic tenets of journalism, which should lead to some serious and tangible consequences for Schefter. Poynter’s Tom Jones makes it clear that what Schefter did is a rather a serious offense in the field of reporting itself:

Now, would it be all right to share just a sentence or brief passage to make sure specific language about a convoluted subject is accurate? Perhaps, but only in very rare, last-resort cases and only to confirm facts, not editorial tone. It’s also OK, in many cases, to verbally tell a source what you’re working on and allow them to share their thoughts, preferably on the record.

But a reporter should never share the entire story and should never invite the source to offer something be “added, changed or tweaked,” as Schefter put it.

Fellow sports journalists also took to their various platforms to slap Schefter around for this indiscretion that happened more than a decade ago.

Andrew Bucholz at Awful Announcing noted the lack of ethics this demonstrates, as Schefter would seem to be biased toward the owners in his work, trading inside favors for inside information.

Jemele Hill, formerly of ESPN and currently of The Atlantic, stated that Schefter never should have done it, noting that in her 20 years in the field “I’ve never let a source proofread, preview or edit any story.” (In defending Schefter against this and similar claims, business/sports analyst Darren Rovell tweeted that “we’ve all done this in the name of accuracy,” a claim he walked back a bit later.)

Jane McManus, a legendary sports journalist, outlined the way Schefter operates outside of journalism tenets for Deadspin in a piece titled: “Don’t be mad at Adam Schefter, he’s not really a journalist anymore” in which she notes:

Schefter isn’t so much an insider as he is a liaison. He has broken massive news, but he doesn’t do investigative reporting on every piece of information he gets. He can’t afford to alienate league sources, and he needs all 32 NFL teams behind him if he wants to continue to break news across the league.

We also have Barry Petchesky of Defector giving the situation a strong once-over with his piece “Adam Schefter is Pathetic and ESPN is Gutless.” He notes that Schefter’s actions don’t just violate “some arcane, ivory-tower, j-school ethical holdover” but really create a serious problem for sports journalism:

The story in question was not the typical Schefter pap. It would be one thing if Schefter was asking someone to sign off on the sort of disposable, 300-word filler item he usually traffics in. Tom Brady, please let me know if you see anything that should be added, changed, tweaked in this story reporting that you still have “the will to win.” That wouldn’t be fine, exactly, but also who cares.

But this story was actual news. It was a story about CBA negotiations between the players and owners during the 2011 lockout. It was a labor battle, with both sides keen to get their spin on events in front of the public. It was a story with real implications for the livelihoods of the people involved. And Adam Schefter chose to let someone from the management side of the bargaining table have final say on how it was presented.

I could easily turn this into a content curation piece titled, “Hey, let’s take Adam Schefter out back and beat the crap out of him!” And I suppose I could just join the clucking chorus of people who find Schefter’s decision to be a terrible violation of journalistic ethics to grind out a simple post. (Truth be told, I DO think this editorial offer and the cozy relationship between Schefter and former WFT President Bruce Allen, clear in the language in this exchange, are seriously problematic for someone purporting to be an objective journalist.)

Instead, I’m laughing at the sheer chutzpah of some “sports journalists” who are treating Schefter like a he’s a whore in church while ignoring that a large wing of the building has been converted to a brothel. How else could you explain “journalist” Jay Glazer’s actions at the 2010 NFL Pro Bowl where he’s begging the coach to let him call a play during the game?

Let me get this straight: I’m not supposed to take a cup of coffee from a source, but this chucklehead gets to badger a source into letting him become part of the action at a professional sporting event? I somehow doubt I’d get away with yelling out during a city council meeting, “Mr. Mayor! Mr. Mayor! Let me propose an amendment! Let me propose an amendment! C’mon….”

It’s not that I’m against sports or sports journalism. I love reading this stuff for info on my favorite teams and updates on my favorite players. I like to know more than who won or who lost, sure, and much of this field and many of my former students and colleagues have gone on to do a lot of good work in this area.

However, many people operating in the field of sports journalism long ago abandoned the “Driver’s Ed Rules of Journalism” that so many of them are claiming to uphold in the wake of the Schefter revelation.

I’m not just talking about the way I can’t get a score in the first three paragraphs of a story because the writer has chosen to blather on about some random detail that they think gives them “insider cred.” Nor am I talking about every lousy rhetorical device and beat-a-dead-horse cliche that shows up in everything they write like rhetorical questions or “game of inches” mentions.

I’m not even talking about the way in which some of these self-professed austere authorities on journalistic writing can’t seem to find a period or a return key if their lives depend on it.

And yes, it still bugs me when reporters say that “Aaron Rodgers has thrown for over 300 yards, completing passes to eight different receivers.” No, he has thrown for MORE THAN 300 yards and of course the receivers are “different.” If we could have cloned Davante Adams, don’t you think we would have done that by now?

And don’t get me started on verbs of attribution…

I’ve given up on all of that ever changing, much in the way that I know nobody really goes the speed limit anymore and rolling stops are totally acceptable behavior unless a cop is nearby and really wants to put the screws to you.

I’m talking about how many of the supposedly vigilant journalists in this area of journalism violate significant journalistic norms on a frequent basis. Consider these areas of concern:

UNNAMED SOURCES: The rule in journalism is that we name our sources except in the most extreme cases. Those cases tend to be things like if the person’s life is in danger or the information is so explosive as to create serious consequences for the source. Think Deep Throat in Watergate, in which the information led Woodward and Bernstein to help bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

The Code of Ethics for the Society of Professional Journalists makes the clear in two key points:

Identify sources clearly. The public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources.

Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Reserve anonymity for sources who may face danger, retribution or other harm, and have information that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Explain why anonymity was granted.

Sports journalists hand out anonymity like Halloween candy. If you think I’m overstating this, consider this set of stories at the top of an ESPN feed:

You have three journalists, covering three sports, all for ESPN, relying on a “source” or “sources.” And I just randomly grabbed this while trying to make this point on a random weekday in October, so it’s not like I had to work really hard to find an example of this approach. In going through the stories, none of the stories name that “source” or “sources,” so we have no idea who said these things, how likely they are to be true or what those individuals’ agendas might be in sharing this information.

I asked a former student of mine who shall remain nameless (since we’re doing that now, apparently) who covers professional sports about the lack of named sources in this part of the field. He said, “If we made these people put their names on this stuff, they wouldn’t tell us anything.”

OK, I get that it can be tough to get a source to put their name on a statement calling Tom Brady a pretentious dingleberry or something, but that’s something we ALL face in EVERY part of journalism.

The question we often have to ask ourselves in journalism is if the juice is worth the squeeze: Can we get this from another source? Is this material worth giving someone the cloak of anonymity? What will this do to future interactions I have with this and other sources who don’t want to talk on the record?

I would wager a pretty hefty amount that a good percentage of the pearl-clutching contingent that is castigating Schefter right now have at least a few “sources said” pieces in their portfolio.

OBJECTIVITY AND FAIRNESS: Most ethical codes surrounding journalism require journalists to adhere to the premise of objectivity and apply the principles of fairness. What that means can vary, but here are some thoughts from a few codes that govern the field:

For every story of significance, there are always more than two sides. While they may not all fit into every account, responsible reporting is clear about what it omits, as well as what it includes.

Ethical journalism resists false dichotomies – either/or, always/never, black/white thinking – and considers a range of alternatives between the extremes.

Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage…

So, be decent, fair, balanced and such, all of which don’t seem to be reflected in The Defector’s piece titled “Kirk Cousins Sucks:”

If the proliferation of highly effective COVID-19 vaccines has done one thing for us, aside from providing life-saving protection against a deadly virus, it’s to reveal exactly what sorts of dickweeds have always been surrounding us in our daily lives. For example, before the vaccines existed, I always thought of Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins as a corny, harmlessly dim guy who I would never want to hang out with, but who for the most part seemed decent enough. He was just a dude. But now, I know the truth: Kirk Cousins fucking sucks!

And let’s go to Deadspin, which is where several of my students have told me that they hope to work someday:

Kyrie is Kyrie’s greatest foe. He has an affinity for becoming the catalyst of hoopla and endless Twitter conversations due to his willful and stupid decisions. We’ve become an audience to a man that’s failing and succeeding on a public stage and every hit and miss — on or off the court — is a fascinating watch. And because of that, one thing has become clear: Kyrie Irving has no idea what the hell he’s doing.

These are a few of the more tame ones from a couple publications that shamed Schefter that I can toss up without truly watching the folks at SAGE explode “Scanners style.” Let’s just say these places aren’t exactly taking an evenhanded approach to content.

UNATTRIBUTED OPINION AND SELF-IMPORTANT GARBAGE: Author Stephen King has been quoted as saying, “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” I also seem to recall at least one editor telling me after I wrote that someone “luckily” escaped a fire, that “If they were lucky, the damned fire wouldn’t have happened at all.”

Maybe that’s a bit too restrictive for the world in which we currently live, but avoiding the inclusion of any opinion is definitely among the basic rules of journalism we supposedly all held near and dear as true bastions of the field. So let’s consider a few sports leads.

Here’s one about my beloved Badgers that ran over the weekend:

MADISON, Wis. — — The one big weakness of Wisconsin’s otherwise outstanding defense this season has been its inability to force turnovers.

(Side note: The Badgers gave up 41 and 38 points on consecutive weekends, so I’m not sure how outstanding that defense is, and no, holding Eastern Michigan to 7 points isn’t supportive evidence of that supposition.)

And here’s one about the Louisiana State game:

BATON ROUGE, La. — — LSU running back Tyrion Davis-Price and the Tiger’s offensive line apparently have figured something out.

That could improve LSU’s prospects for the balance of what has been a turbulent season.

And here’s one about Georgia, the No. 1 team in the country:

ATHENS, Ga. — — The final seconds were meaningless.

Except to the Georgia defense.

If I were grading these leads, I’d be scrawling “SAYS WHO?” all over the place.

There’s nothing wrong with not leading with the score, although I’d argue that’s what most people would actually want to read, as opposed to whatever self-important tortured prose the writer feels necessary to impose upon us to inflate their ego. However, if you’re going to dive into this field of random concept leads, let’s do it in a way that actually works.

Find people who say that Wisconsin’s defense is awesome, but sucks at getting turnovers, that LSU is having more turbulence this year than the final scene of “Passenger 57” and that Georgia’s D cared about the final seconds. Then actually quote those people and make that your lead.

Even worse than that is when the journalists decide that it’s super-important to mention themselves in their work. Again, I’ve given up on the “Told ESPN” or “exclusively revealed to WXYZ” or other self-aggrandizing crap that masquerades as “branding” and “marketing.”

However, here’s the lead of Mike Florio’s piece on the latest shoe to drop in the WFT email scandal:

Well, now we know why NFL general counsel Jeff Pash declined a request to be interviewed by PFT.

In one sentence, he references his publication (Pro Football Talk), pats himself on the back for requesting an interview, weaves in first person and essentially writes in the language of “smirk.” Not bad for a guy who took Schefter to task for not following standard operating procedures when it comes to real journalism. (And that was the best “smirk back” I could manage.)

In any case…

The bigger question of “Is all of this terrible?” deserves to be addressed here. If the people who publish this stuff are serving an audience, providing information and not harming others who don’t deserve it, OK, fine.

Go ahead and call someone a “dickweed” or spend six paragraphs explaining how a coach picking his nose was a profound moment that led to a 58-0 blowout win. Write opinion pieces that go on for about 7,000 words and include the word “doucheknuckle” or whatever.

But admit that’s what you are and stop trying to pretend you wouldn’t do anything outside of the restrictive tenets of journalism because its beneath the dignity of the field you hold in such high esteem. Be honest with yourself and your audience by saying something like, “No, it wasn’t smart what he did, but we’ve all bent a rule here or there and probably shouldn’t have.”

Or to put it in language these folks might understand:

“Let ye who is without an amazingly, viciously, painfully awkward personal or professional screw up look off the free safety and then use your laser-rocket arm to cast that first stone and put it right on the numbers when your team needs it the most. Otherwise, dig deep into your bag of tricks and diagram a better response in your playbook.”

Other than that, the story was perfect: Boulder Daily Camera retracts a 9/11 reflections piece due to lies, fictions and falsehoods

Even small errors in journalism, like getting a date wrong or misspelling a street name, can cost you a great amount of credibility with your readers. So, I’m wondering what the folks of Boulder, Colorado thought when they woke up Saturday to find their paper had retracted a story due to massive journalistic fraud:

The Camera is retracting an article that appeared in its Sept. 11 edition, headlined “Reflections on finding peace.” The newspaper has concluded the article substantially misrepresented the stories of its primary subjects — Mark Pfundstein, John Maynard and Danna Hirsch.

The Camera has determined that multiple statements attributed to these sources, including purported direct quotations, were fabricated.

What follows this embarrassing, but seemingly tame, opening is a list of at least 30 egregious errors and fabrications in a story The Boulder Daily Camera published for its 9/11 edition. The paper itself notes that “this list does not necessarily constitute every error in the article,” which at this point felt like the paper said, “Somebody found ANOTHER screw up? Oh, hell, we give up on this…”

It’s not always possible to fact check every quote, nor has every source who claimed “That’s not what I said,” been right about that statement, but this is beyond ridiculous. Of the errors listed, here are a couple that I think a semi-decent editor would have caught:

The headline’s labeling of the subjects of the story as “survivors of 9/11.” None were present at any of the attack locations.
The location of the Pentagon.
The timing of some events on 9/11.

The story is truly retracted, as in I couldn’t find it anywhere online and others who had been tracking it noted it “suddenly went ‘poof.'”

(UPDATE: Shout out to Ted Bridis who found the original story via press reader. You can see it here.)

The paper didn’t identify the writer or what “internal steps” the folks at the paper planned to take in this situation. However, journalist and educator Corey Hutchins took to Substack to fill in a few of these holes:

According to the bio on the paper’s website, Morganroth worked for the Prairie Mountain Media organization since December and has more than 20 years of experience in media:

(That said, her LinkedIn profile is a bit less aggrandizing and a bit messier in terms of jobs and a timeline, which includes a photo business that seems to have started when she was in third grade, so in the wake of a situation like this 9/11 story, I’d be really interested to see an objective and complete look at who she is and what she’s done.)

When it comes to situations like this one, the reason for blogging about it is to point out things that we can all learn from. In this case, I think there are multiple “teachable moments” related to all of the aspects of this debacle:

BE TRANSPARENT: The Daily Camera was about half right in its actions related to this mess. First, it retracted the story. Second, it tried to make amends to its sources and readers (kinda). Third, it promised to deal with the situation so it wouldn’t happen again.

Where it failed was in several key areas of transparency, such as killing the story from its archives entirely. Although several other major media outlet such as Rolling Stone have done similar things, the model the Atlantic used in regard to Ruth Shalit Barrett’s retracted piece on parents obsessed over niche sports seems to be the best. The magazine ran the entire correction/retraction under her byline and included a PDF of the original article for people to read so they could see what the editors initially saw.

In deleting the original, we all have no real idea what the editors saw or how truly egregious the content was. Sure we can guess from what they’ve told us, but the line about not being sure it caught all the errors doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in my ability to make a guess.

Second, the paper should have released the name of the reporter to the public, but not for the purpose of public shaming. I’m not a huge fan of burning people at the stake on Twitter because they used the wrong pronoun or they mumbled when accidentally combining two words in a way that sound to almost nobody but the highly offendable like a racial slur.

However, when we’re talking about someone who fabricated THIS MUCH stuff in ONE ARTICLE, it probably merits naming names so people can figure out what other stuff this person wrote and how seriously it should be taken.

Between that 9/11 article and her final listing on the publication’s website, Morganroth appears to have written at least five other pieces. How much of those are real? Do they contain errors that might need correcting? If they readers don’t know who faked the 9/11 story, how can they feel secure in the work ANYONE at the paper did?

Think about it like this: If you went home to eat some leftovers for dinner tonight, and your roommate said, “Hey, I ate some leftovers for lunch and I’ve been throwing up all day,” wouldn’t it be highly likely that you’d like to know what they ate? And if they DIDN’T tell you, what’s the likelihood you’d be calling for a pizza instead of touching anything in the fridge?

By explaining who did what, the paper could limit the credibility damage and support the people at the paper who continue to abide by the ethical standards of journalism.

START DIGGING: Every time something like this happens, I go back to what my friend Allison used to tell me about shady folks she covered her investigative reporting days: “They never did it just once.”

When Mike Ward of the Houston Chronicle was caught fabricating “regular people” and their quotes, it turned out he had done this multiple times across many years.

Stephen Glass fabricated entire stories at The New Republic, with an internal investigation finding 27 of his 41 pieces were either partially or completely made up. (Some suspected even more had falsehoods or fakery in them.)

When Jayson Blair was caught making up content in The New York Times, researchers found he was faking things as far back as his time with The Diamondback student newspaper at Maryland.

When Glass did an interview with “60 Minutes” a few years after he was caught, he outlined the way in which he took a small step into the world of fraud with a single faked quote. After that, it was a few more of them until eventually, he was making up things out of whole cloth.

I could be wrong in my assumption here, but I’m guessing Morganroth probably followed a similar pattern. I can’t believe a journalist of with any longevity in the field would be Dudley Do Right for their entire career and then wake up one day and go to this level of fraud on a single story.

When a story emerges from a reporter and it’s found to have fakery in it, particularly in such an egregious fashion as the 9/11 story had, it’s like seeing a cockroach in your apartment: It’s not good for anyone involved and that roach probably has more than a few friends you haven’t found yet.

To what degree folks at Morganroth’s former media outlets decide to dig into this remains to be seen, but given what we’ve seen here, they probably should start digging.

DON’T START: In terms of a lesson for beginning journalists, I guess the easiest one is “don’t try this at home.” I might be cynical here, but I’m guessing almost every reporter at some time or another thought about cutting a corner. As we saw with the Mike Ward situation, it was almost always in regard to those “salt-of-the-earth” people who were just in the story to add color to it.

(I always hated those stories, as I found that people viewed me with suspicion when I approached them and they never had anything amazing to say. Still, I went about my duty to ask them if they were really enjoying their ice cream cones on this wonderful sunny day at the beach.)

If you get lazy or frustrated or annoyed or whatever, it can be so easy to rationalize a bit of fakery:

Nobody’s going to know if the guy who liked corn dogs at the county fair really exists…

I’m sure there’s a fan out there who thinks the team could win it all this year…

Everybody loves a parade…

In looking at these examples, it can seem like an innocuous move that doesn’t hurt anyone. In looking at the Daily Camera story and the others listed here, you can see making this move leads nowhere good.

It’s never just one time. It’s never just the one hot-dog vendor or ride operator. It always gets bigger. Someone almost always finds out. Nothing will ever be the same for your career after it occurs.

The best way to avoid a situation like the one in Boulder is to not put yourself in it in the first place.

Reporter/source dating, on-the-record/off-the-record and Filak’s First Rule of Holes: A look at “The Biden White House’s First Media Scandal”

If there’s one group of people I have complete and total sympathy for, it is single people who would like to find a meaningful relationship with another human being in today’s world.

Between the digital media pitfalls that exist around every corner (social media stalkers, potential dates finding the stupid tweets you put out seven years ago, the sharing of “personal photos” that get airdropped to the entire world) and the insane life schedules (work, family, health), I can’t think of anything more stressful than trying to connect with a new person in hopes of building a life right now.

And that’s not even counting the pandemic. Exactly how do you end a “socially distanced” date? (I can imagine the conversations with friends afterward: “So when he elbow-bumped you, was it like a REAL elbow-bump or was it like he just kind of felt awkward when you went in for the bump and just reciprocated?”)

(Side note: Amy and I have a mutually agreed upon pre-nup that says if one of us forces the other one back onto the dating market for any reason other than death, we give up our rights to any marital property. Plus, I would get to burn her knitting stash or she would get to set fire to my baseball cards, just to be mean. THAT’S how scary the dating pool seems to us…)

So, even though we’ve talked about the concept of source-reporter relationships here as something to avoid when possible, I get why it’s hard for two people like (now former) White House deputy press secretary T.J. Ducklo and political journalist Alexi McCammond to give up the connection due to work entanglements. She had been covering the Biden campaign and he had been promoting it, so once romance entered the picture, things had to change.

According to a profile on the pair in People magazine, they both decided to play by the ethical rules of the field:

“We both realized we both felt the same way,” Ducklo, who joined the Biden White House as a deputy press secretary, tells PEOPLE. “We’re both really happy, and we wanted to do it the right way.”

That meant telling their bosses. An Axios spokeswoman says McCammond, who joined the site in 2017, told her editors about the relationship in November “and asked to be taken off of the Biden beat.” She was reassigned to covering progressive lawmakers in Congress and progressives across the U.S. as well as Vice President Kamala Harris, the spokeswoman says.

“We stand behind her and her coverage,” the spokeswoman says of McCammond, describing her as “a valued member of the Axios team.”

For her part, McCammond says, “When my personal life had the potential to interfere with my work, I didn’t think twice about sharing my happiness in November with Axios that I’d found someone in TJ who shows up for me in a way I’d only hoped for.”

While the People profile was apparently fair game, Ducklo appeared to have a problem with Politico writing about the relationship, according to a Vanity Fair article:

The confrontation began on Inauguration Day, January 20, after (Politico reporter Tara) Palmeri, a coauthor of Politico’s Playbook, contacted McCammond for comment while one of her male colleagues left a message for Ducklo, according to the sources. Ducklo subsequently called a Playbook editor to object to the story, but was told to call the Playbook reporters with his concerns. But instead of calling the male reporter who initially contacted him, Ducklo tried to intimidate Palmeri by phone in an effort to kill the story. “I will destroy you,” Ducklo told her, according to the sources, adding that he would ruin her reputation if she published it.

The article goes on to say that Ducklo made derogatory and sexist comments in an “off-the-record” conversation with Palmeri, noting that she had been jealous of his relationship with McCammond. He also used language I’m not allowed to use here, but let’s just say Ducklo said he believed that McCammond was of a greater sexual interest to at least one other man than Palmeri was.

The White House, which initially complained that Palmeri broke the “off-the-record” agreement with Ducklo, announced last week that Ducklo has been suspended for one week for his comments and Ducklo has issued a formal apology to Palmeri and her media outlet.

Over the weekend, Ducklo resigned from his position and issued a formal apology for his actions.

This situation didn’t have to get to this point, so let’s go through a couple points that might help you if you land in a similar romantic entanglement:

DO THE RIGHT THING: The one thing that I can’t stress enough is that initially Ducklo and McCammond DID do the right thing when they became an item. They went to their bosses, talked it out and got everyone on the same page.

This isn’t an easy thing to do, and I can speak from experience. In two of my journalistic stops, I was romantically engaged with a person who was working on the opposite side of the fence: Once it was a city council rep when I was at the State Journal and once it was a police dispatcher when I was the crime editor in Missouri. In both cases, I came clean, but in the former, I didn’t really say anything until we were engaged. (Not exactly bright, but I also wasn’t DIRECTLY on that beat… And yes, that sound you hear is a hair splitting…) In the other case, she got the job after I already had mine, so it was a “ground-level” discussion and everything panned out fine.

As much as this is an awkward situation, it’s like removing a Band-Aid: Grab a corner and yank. You’ll be much better off.

CHIVALRY MIGHT BE DEAD, BUT STUPIDITY LIVES ON: The idea of defending a fair maiden from the evil trolls who might do her harm is a swoon-worthy concept in fairy tales. Calling up a reporter and threatening her for reporting on your relationship is dumber than garlic-flavored toothpaste.

Something tells me that McCammond can more than hold her own against pretty much anything anyone tosses at her. She’s a veteran reporter of MSNBC and Axios, so she’s used to political hatchet jobs (which assumes this Politico piece would be one, which isn’t fair to Politico at this point). She’s also probably dealt with a ton of sexism, racism and misogyny as a woman of color who works for national media outlets, so she’s not going to wilt like a magnolia in a rainstorm if someone starts saying mean things about her and her boyfriend in public.

The not-so-smooth moves started when Ducklo called Palmeri’s editor first, in a conversation that just screams, “Hey, bro, get that little lady to back up off me a bit, ‘kay?” When the editor did the right journalism thing, and told Ducklo to call the people working on the story, Ducklo swung and missed again. He didn’t return the call of the MALE co-author who was working on the story, but rather decided to go after the FEMALE co-author with his puffer-fish routine. I can’t imagine exactly why Ducklo thought this was a necessary move or a good idea, but it was clear that he wasn’t thinking a whole heck of a lot.

Having said all this, I have no difficulty imagining how Amy would react if she found out in a very public way that I called up her supervising nurse and told the woman to back off of my beloved or I’ll go all “Ivan Drago in ‘Rocky IV'” on your ass.

My imagination leads me to sleeping in the milk house for a week, protecting my sports stuff from a fire.

THERE ARE LIMITS TO OFF-THE-RECORD CONVERSATIONS: When I think of how on-the-record/off-the-record conversations work, journalists and sources tend think of as being like a safety measure for both people involved.

I tend to see them this way:

In other words, the concept of off-the-record can protect some vital areas, but it’s a vest, not the Iron Man suit. If a source tells you, off-the-record, that they plan to murder a school bus full of children after this interview, you should strongly consider calling the cops. I don’t think there will be any serious journalists writing op-eds on your lack of ethical standards.

Journalists and sources should ALWAYS work out exactly what on-the-record and off-the-record mean before going off of the record. This is where you decide what can be used and how that source should be referred to, among other things. It’s for both of your benefits.

An experienced press aide like Ducklo should know that. He should also know that threatening a reporter’s career and reputation would clearly fall outside of the bounds of what she’d dutifully keep to herself, for fear of revealing a double-super-secret conversation she had a source. He crossed a line and that was going to become public and painful.

Which leads us nicely into the final point…

FILAK’S FIRST RULE OF HOLES: As we’ve explained numerous times on the blog, Filak’s First Rule of Holes is simple: “When you find yourself in one, stop digging.”

Ducklo and McCammond knew from the jump that this kind of relationship was going to garner attention, which is why they played by the rules and made the right moves immediately. They even participated in the media circus part of it, granting a heck of a lot of access to People for that profile.

(Say what you want about the quality of journalism in People or Politico or whatever, but if you want people to respect your privacy, the best way to do that is NOT to be featured in a publication with a circulation of nearly 100 million.)

Even if it wasn’t an “open secret” as Politico mentioned in its Playbook coverage, it was now out there and people were going to figure it out. The best thing to do was to realize you’re standing in a little hole, of your own making, and decide to let the chips fall where they may. This is the kind of story that goes away in a half a news cycle and involves, no personal offense to either of them, relatively B-list folks in the entirety of the political machine.

Instead, every step Ducklo made came with the sound of a shovel hitting the dirt, digging deeper and deeper. It intensified the scrutiny on the relationship when he went after Palmeri. It extended the news cycle when the word got out about the threats and his assessment of her as a woman and a journalist. It forced the issue to become a talking point for everyone out there from journalistic groups of great importance to twerps like me who run a blog.

(It also basically wrote the headline for half the people out there. How do you not hear the headline in “I will destroy you” when you’re saying it? Also, what’s that rules about not picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel?)

In the end, this, too, will pass, but if you want to make sure it passes more quickly if you end up in this spot, just remember that rule about holes.

Unforgettable Indiscretions: Student newspapers and requests for deleting old stories in the wake of the Boston Globe’s Fresh Start Initiative

In the 15 years or so I advised student newspapers, the most popular feature we produced was the police blotter.

At the Ball State Daily News, the listings appeared under the “Police Beat” title, while UWO’s Advance-Titan went with the more accusatory name of “BUSTED!” In both places, a reporter would go to the campus police station once a week and collect a litany of small crime items that weren’t worth a huge story, but likely held some level of interest to folks.

We tended to have a lot of underage drinking tickets, public intoxication arrests, drug busts and similar consumption concerns. Occasionally, we would end up with a fight, a verbal altercation or a case of vandalism. Anything more serious than that tended to be highlighted and relayed to us by the police department in the form of an alert or a press release.

(The one “BUSTED!” item that sticks in my mind all these years later happened the year before I started advising the paper. A male student and a female student were caught having sex behind the giant concrete UW-Oshkosh sign near the main thoroughfare of campus. When the police “stepped in,” the male begged the cop not to write a report or issue a citation, because then his sexual indiscretion would end up in “BUSTED!” and his girlfriend would find out about it…)

Although these features were popular among our general readers, we found them to be less popular among the people whose names ended up in them. In many cases, we received requests to not publish a particular person’s legal infraction or to remove the reports of them that we had previously printed. At one point, the requests became so popular that the Daily News put the phrase “It’s not our fault you ended up in Police Beat” on the back of the staff T-shirts.

The standing response was that we don’t edit our archives or try to change history. If it happened and we wrote it, it stays put.

Those papers I advised weren’t the only ones to hold that line, as many of student media outlets have policies like this one from the newspaper at Northwest Missouri State University, where my buddy Steve Chappell serves as the adviser:

The Northwest Missourian never knowingly publishes inaccuracies. If any error is found, The Northwest Missourian is obligated to correct the error as soon as possible, regardless of the source of the error. A consistent location, signature and style for corrections and clarifications is recommended.
The Northwest Missourian does not remove any editorial content from its website. However, if there is a factual inaccuracy in a story, the editors will run a correction or an update as needed. When a person calls in question of a fact published they should never be guaranteed a correction will run. A section editor must first confirm that the fact in question is an inaccuracy.

In a lot of ways, this can make sense. The hard-line approach prevents staffers from having to pick and choose among which things are worthy or unworthy of “scrubbing” from an archive. The requirement of factual accuracy being at issue makes it clear that someone being embarrassed or upset over accurate coverage isn’t going to cut it in terms of a correction or retraction.

What seems like a simple cut-and-dried approach to archived indiscretion became more complicated recently when the Boston Globe decided to give people a chance to get a pass on their past. The “Fresh Start Initiative” allows people to request a review of previously published content about them for updates, removal or other reconsideration:

Similar to “right to forget” programs that have cropped up in a number of newsrooms across the country, the undertaking is meant to address the lasting impact that stories about past embarrassments, mistakes,or minor crimes, forever online and searchable, can have on a person’s life.

“It was never our intent to have a short and relatively inconsequential Globe story affect the futures of the ordinary people who might be the subjects,” said Brian McGrory, editor of The Boston Globe. “Our sense, given the criminal justice system, is that this has had a disproportionate impact on people of color. The idea behind the program is to start addressing it.”

Truth be told, student newsrooms have been talking about these concerns for years and have had policies that support whatever position they took. To get a better grip on what student media outlets were doing regarding “take-down requests” and their thoughts on them based upon what the Globe had done, I posed the question on the College Media Advisers listserv.

In many cases, folks explained they had a pretty solid and long-running policy on how they viewed their content. The policy at The Temple News, for example, offers authority to any given editor-in-chief to remove or retain content, but it notes that published content, regardless of format, is seen as part of the “historical record.”

Others, like the Elon News Network at Elon University, provide a pathway to content removal and a process to petition the organization:

ENN has created a review board of organization leaders and faculty advisers to review content that has been petitioned to have content changed. The board will meet at least once a semester to review all requests.

The content removal petition form is available online, and should meet the following requirements:

The petition must be filed by the person directly involved, and not be made on behalf of an individual.
Three years must have passed from the content’s publication.
The form below must be filled out and submitted. Any relevant documents that the review board should be made aware of should be submitted in the form. The review board will not take into consideration any documents submitted after the board has met.

One adviser noted that her students were looking at revising the policy, given the ubiquity of the internet. The line of “Nothing ever truly disappears on the internet” is more true now than ever before. It used to be that a web page could be abandoned and it would fall so far off the beaten path, nobody would find it. Even more, I know at least one student paper where I worked lost a ton of archives when it switched providers.

Today? That stuff would be easy to find and accessible with about two clicks and a simple search term.

(Another interesting angle someone brought up was the way in which efforts to preserve the past are now opening up more windows to older embarrassing incidents. When libraries or media outlets decide to digitize past issues and make them searchable, suddenly that arrest for drinking and driving that your step-dad swears never happened is at your fingertips, complete with his bad 1970s feathered-hair mug shot.)

The question of how to do this is often more concerned with what are the ramifications for doing this at all. In a listserv discussion on this topic, the director of publications at Western Kentucky mentioned a concern I often had in regard to this situation:

The attorney who represents the College Heights Herald and the Talisman has pretty consistently given the advice that you open a Pandora’s Box by granting a takedown request. If you later turn a request down, then you could be subject to being found arbitrary if the matter went to court.

It will be interesting to see if litigation emerges from what The Boston Globe is doing. For the time being, I still favor the “you can’t rewrite history” mantra, with offering to update the story to reflect how it turned out – but with documentation.

As for most legal things, I turn to the Student Press Law Center, which has a giant list of things to consider and processes to follow in this regard. The explanation of how the law works and why it works that way makes a lot of sense. It also outlines the potential legal potholes you might hit along the road. One other thing SPLC touches on in this write up is the way in which the law and ethics can diverge.

In other words, just because you “can” do something, it doesn’t follow that you “should” do something, and that involves both publishing and removing content. In the case of removing content, the law might say you are on firm ground leaving up the story about the freshman who was arrested after police found him asleep, naked in a tree. However, that kid is now a 30-year-old local minister who has done a world of good, but for some reason, Google’s algorithm keeps putting that at the top of any search of his name. Is it “right” to keep that at the forefront of any discussion of this guy?

To that end, was it “right” to publish it in the first place, even though the law said you could? When it was a day-long or week-long embarrassment that probably won’t make it beyond the campus confines, publishing the content might not seem like that big of a deal. However, if you knew something would follow this person their entire lives and nothing they did could ever scrub it off, would you think twice before publishing something about a drunk freshman peeing in a campus parking lot after a house party?

I don’t know exactly how to split that hair, but an adviser who has worked with me to make the reporting book much better explained his approach in fantastic fashion:

This is the reason I strongly encourage our editors not to pursue stories focusing on minor “crime” stories, things involving drugs and alcohol and general college-aged stupidity. College is a time in a person’s life when they should explore and experiment. And they should not have to live with the punishment of such misdeeds for the rest of their lives. Good gosh, if Google was a thing when I was in college …

I usually err on the side of the person over any notion of journalism ethics.

Human first. Journalist second.

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