Ethics

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.

 

Breaking Dak: The ethics of broadcasting injuries in sports

TRIGGER WARNING: There are some graphic videos here of traumatic injuries. I will only embed one, which I’m guessing a lot of people have already seen. The rest will be via link. Watch at your own discretion. -VFF

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The outcome of the Dallas Cowboys/New York Giants game Sunday was completely overshadowed by an injury to quarterback Dak Prescott, who sustained a compound fracture and dislocation of his right ankle.

Prescott was scrambling for a first down when his body went one way and a sizeable portion of his lower leg went the other way:

(If you don’t want to watch this, I don’t blame you. My wife, Amy, a nurse who loves to talk about brain surgery over dinner and is an avid watcher of “Doctor Pimple Popper,” was really disturbed when she saw this.)

Tony Romo, who was in the booth doing color commentary for CBS, immediately realized something was horrible, proclaiming, “Oh no… Oh NO!” As a former QB, Romo has been on the turf for Dallas a few times with severe injuries. However, he seemed to almost want to magically wish this one away by saying, “You almost gotta hope it’s a cramp right there…” After about three replays, he knew that wasn’t the case.

As fascinating as this was, much like other things that are odd, chaotic and disturbing, I found myself watching it a few times and yet hating that I could see what had happened.

When it comes to gruesome sports injuries, the question for journalists is, “What is enough coverage?” The answer seems to vary from situation to situation and announcer to announcer.

Take the case of Clint Malarchuk, a goalie for the Buffalo Sabres, who caught a skate to the neck in a 1989 game against the St. Louis Blues. The gash sliced open his jugular vein and slashed through his carotid artery. If not for the presence of Sabres’ athletic trainer Jim Pizzutelli, a former US Army combat medic who served in the Vietnam War, Malarchuk would have likely died that night. 

As blood began hitting the ice, the announcers immediately implored the camera operator to stop showing the injury. Malarchuk actually skated off the ice after he received assistance from Pizzutelli and that was the only other shot of him. No replays, no slow-motion blood gushing. After that, the camera stayed in a distance shot of the ice until everything was cleaned up and play was ready to resume.

Contrast that with the case of former Raiders running back Napoleon McCallum, who sustained a career-ending knee injury on Monday Night Football at the start of the 1994 season. Ken Norton of the San Francisco 49ers hit McCallum low when he crashed into the pile, but McCallum’s cleat stuck in the turf, forcing his knee to buckle backwards at an almost completely right angle.

I remember watching this game on TV and the announcers kept showing it over and over and over again, going in slow motion to show each frame worth of knee distortion. Each time they did it, it was accompanied by an announcer saying, “Oh… You hate to see that” or “You might not want to watch this…” And yet, they kept showing it.

Perhaps the most famous Monday Night Football injury involved Washington Football quarterback Joe Theismann, who saw his career end on the field. Linebacker Lawrence Taylor, who made a career out of having no regard for his own body or that of quarterbacks, snapped Theismann’s leg in half. Immediately, Taylor popped up and started waving for the trainer as he held his head in his hands in disbelief.

As the officials tried to figure out what to do about this mangled man, ABC kept looking for the best possible angle to figure out what had happened, finally finding a reverse angle that will never leave your head if you see it once. To its credit, once ABC got there, the station didn’t show it again.

So, the question remains, “How much is too much?”

There might be an official code that outlines this, but I’m having difficulty finding one. Thus, what you see below is kind of a patchwork of various codes that could provide some guidance:

The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA), which deals primarily with broadcast journalism, has a section in its ethical code about accountability  that touches somewhat on this:

Journalism provides enormous benefits to self-governing societies. In the process,it can create inconvenience, discomfort and even distress. Minimizing harm, particularly to vulnerable individuals, should be a consideration in every editorial and ethical decision.

(A similar approach came in this voluntary code of digital broadcasters, which seems to have come from the National Association of Broadcasters.)

The Football Writers Association of America, which deals more with college sports coverage,  lists of elements within its code of ethics to deal with issues happening on the field. Under “Minimize Harm,” it notes the following elements:

  • Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity with children or inexperienced sources or subjects.
  • Be sensitive when seeking or using photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.
  • Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.

(For reasons past my understanding, I can’t find the code of ethics for the pro version of these folks. Maybe it’s buried in the “members only” section.)

In contrast, the Society of Professional Journalists, digs into the ethics of the field at length in its code. Along with the minimize harm stuff that was in the other codes, here was an interesting add:

Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do.

Obviously “pandering” and “lurid” are in the eye of the beholder, but it does provide the “If your friends all jumped off a bridge, would you?” line of logic on this one.
I always go back to the line I remember hearing at the State Journal, where we employed “The Breakfast Test.” If someone were picking up our paper and reading it over breakfast, would the images (or in some cases EXTREMELY vivid writing) make that person puke in their Cheerios?
 

And, yet, again, this is variable in a lot of ways. Papers up by us have no problem running photos of people who have “cleaned” deer and pose next to the gutted, skinned carcasses hanging from trees. The hunting community is used to that. For a lot of other folks, that’s going to be a breakfast showstopper.

In any case, the unfortunate answer to the question, “How much is too much?” when it comes this kind of coverage is like most ethical or “taste” situations: It depends.

The audience you serve, the expectations they have, the previous things you’ve shown them with or without problem and more come into this. However, even if you don’t have a concrete answer, it helps to discuss this to find ways to understand what to do when you find yourself in a situation like this. The more you can gain collective knowledge in advance, the better prepared you will be to make your choice.

Actual Malice: An open letter to college administrators regarding COVID-19

Dear chancellors, presidents and other top administrators of U.S. colleges and universities,

If you want to see what kind of college experience you are providing to your students, I would invite you to spend your morning where I did on Monday: In a line on campus for a COVID-19 test.

I had two emails over the weekend from students I met with on Wednesday who told me they either were in contact with someone who had tested positive or were exhibiting symptoms of the illness.

My wife, a nurse who works with an elderly and immuno-compromised community of people, demanded that I get tested, in spite of my explanations that I had sanitized, I was masked, I was distanced, I only saw the students once and more. I had done everything my university had told me and yet, there I was, outside of Albee Hall at 10:30 a.m. with a burgeoning line of undergraduate students.

You need to go out where your kids are being tested for COVID-19, administrative folks, as I lack the ability to adequately capture the eeriness of our “new normal.” The only normal thing about this experience was that everyone in line was typing on their phone.

The line was mostly socially distanced as it bent through the wide pathway where students often crowd between classes. Aside from a few stragglers walking out of the student union and one kid wandering in and out of the library in about 10 seconds, we saw almost no one. Campus felt deserted and tense.

Nobody in line spoke and no one really spoke to anyone in line. The silence was such that not only could I hear the soft chirps of a few birds in a distant tree, but I could hear the wind ruffling the environmentally friendly grasses and plants that dotted the walkway. When a student recognized me and we began a conversation, it seemed like I should lower my voice. I kept feeling like I was yelling during a funeral visitation, even as I spoke at a relatively subdued volume.

One by one, students walked out of Albee, wiping their noses with tissue or folding up paperwork. Some had friends who came to be tested while others brought someone for moral support. One younger woman slowly walked out of the testing site, her shoulders slumped slightly and her demeanor one of exhaustion. Her friend approached her and for a second looked like she was going to give her what she desperately appeared to need: A hug. The friend seemed to catch herself just in time and stopped short. They then left the area, walking together, but at least three or four feet apart.

The line moved slowly inside where a crew of more than a dozen people had donned the kind of things you’d expect to see in a movie about aliens. Shields, gloves, gowns, masks and more. They were plastified to the nines.

The signs on the door, apparently left over from last year, told students to enjoy the updated athletic facilities. Plastered over the top of some of them were printouts that explained who could or couldn’t be tested for the coronavirus. Each student was asked, “Do you have an appointment?” An alarming number of them said, no, they didn’t, but they called a university hotline to explain their circumstances and were told to report immediately to testing. Some had appointments later in the week, but symptoms appeared and they were told, “Get here. Now.”

So, to Albee Hall they came, at 10:30 on a Monday morning, less than one week into their first week of the semester, to find out if they would test positive for an illness that has already killed enough people in this country to fill Lambeau Field to capacity more than twice.

Welcome to college.

In the courses I am teaching this term, we discuss the concept of culpability as it relates to libel and it often comes down to one of two standards: Negligence and actual malice.

Negligence is easier to prove. The concept is that the defendants in the case either did something they shouldn’t have or failed to do something they should have to prevent the harmful outcome. In other words, you did your job in a sloppy fashion and thus created the problem.

Actual malice is tough to prove, but it isn’t impossible. Defendants accused of this, essentially,  knew something was wrong and did it anyways. It’s a conscious choice to act in a way that creates harm, knowing full well the problematic outcome that can follow.

The question we ask in this situation is, “Did you have a reckless disregard for the truth?”

If we had to apply those standards to the reopening of colleges in this country, it might not be a hard case to prove negligence against administrators who began school in the late weeks of July or the early weeks of August.

You know social distancing is required to keep this illness from spreading, but your institutions have spent years trying to cram students into classrooms, libraries, dorms and other facilities to maximize enrollment and thus increase institutional income.  You stack bodies like cord wood where possible and rely on communal bathroom facilities in many living quarters.

(Dorms have changed a good deal since I was in school, but the stories I hear from students tell me one thing is still true: You’re basically on top of your roommate whenever you’re both in the room.)

You pushed faculty to offer in-person classes or classes that could at least have an in-person component. Classes that drew students to campus and put butts in classroom seats were valued. You created all sorts of untested hybrid options with the idea that some personal interaction was better than none. Faculty objected and students went with online options when possible, but still you persisted.

You created pokazukha websites and plans and fliers for your students and faculty, complete with testing sites and “dashboard numbers” of tests and cases. You told them that “We’re all in this together” and that things would be fine because you were locked and loaded for this war.

Then, you passed the buck to a group of 18-to-22-year-olds and told them, “We want you to have a normal college experience” in the same breath that you layered on admonitions and restrictions that made such an experience impossible. You also told these students to act in a fashion that belied your decades of experience observing students, even as you lacked the resources or structure to enforce such edicts to the extent necessary to avoid case spikes.

Administrators, flip your calendar back to any point in your entire academic career. Mentally recall the scene at a campus-area bar on Friday. Think back to your memories of one of your more raucous “party places” (frats, sororities, BMOC homes or whatever matters on your campus) on Saturday.

(Hell, look at what happened when states “relaxed” stay-at-home orders and thousands of chuckleheaded so-called adults poured into bars, restaurants and anywhere else that served food and booze with a side order of dangerous proximity issues.)

Now think about what you told students to do to avoid this plague. I don’t think Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was as optimistic as you all were about the likelihood of this succeeding.

Could these early adopters have crossed all your fingers and toes, thought, “Maybe the kids are going to game up” and hoped for the best? Sure, but that level of naiveté is still enough to make an argument for negligence.

As for those of you who brought students to campus in the past two weeks? I could imagine Dick Wolf doing a “Law and Order” special “ripped from the headlines” episode about actual malice in this case.

You relied on the same sanitation methods, the same masking requirements and the same social distancing efforts that led other schools to fail miserably, and yet you went ahead and opened your campuses anyway.

You saw the spikes happening at school after school, just as everyone with a brain predicted, and instead of rethinking your approach, you pressed forward.

You saw the dead canaries piling up at the entrance to the mine shaft and you said, “My canary will be fine. Onward.”

You saw those schools that tried to make a go of it fail and fail and fail again and yet you refused to accept reality.

As W.C. Fields famously noted, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damned fool about it.”

You weren’t fools. You were reckless.

You were reckless with the physical health and safety of your students, faculty and staff, most of whom, I would imagine, find themselves pondering every cough, sniffle and sneeze.

You were reckless with the physical health of those people’s family and loved ones, because they might carry home with them an undetected case of COVID-19.

You were reckless with the mental health of everyone in both of those groups. I bet I’m not the only one who spends countless hours worrying about everything from catching this thing to figuring out how to immediately “go online” the minute someone above my pay grade decides the tuition checks have cleared or the numbers look too bad to persist. Between furloughs, increased class loads, shifting platforms, delivery shifts and more, I find myself panicking more now than at any point in my two decades in higher education about my ability to do my job.

As I wrote this, my email inbox popped up with a new message. My results came back as negative.

No quarantine or isolation for me. Amy says I don’t have to sleep in the milk house to keep her and the kid safe.

At least, until I get another email, from another kid, telling me about another set of symptoms and another crest of anxiety builds within.

If you want to discuss this cycle of disaster further at that point, you know where to find me.

In a line outside Albee Hall, hoping for the best and praying it’s not the worst.

Best,

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

 

‘Can you?’ vs. ‘Should you?’ A secret recording of a Wisconsin government phone call that inspired five random thoughts for journalism students

In trying to explain ethics to my intro writing students, I often fall back on the line that, “Ethics basically deal with things that aren’t illegal, but can get you in a lot of trouble, anyway.” Another way we separate law and ethics is the line between, “Can I do X?” vs. “Should I do X?”

This concept came into focus in a strange way last week, as Wisconsin continued to put the “fun” in “dysfunction” at the state government level:

MADISON – Republican legislative leaders lashed out Wednesday at Democratic Gov. Tony Evers after his staff secretly recorded a May 14 phone conversation over how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic the day after the state Supreme Court struck down the state’s stay-at-home order.

The recording and the reaction to it all but ensures a permanently broken relationship between Evers and Republicans who control the Legislature. The two sides have rarely gotten along since Evers was elected in 2018 and Wednesday’s episode was characterized by GOP leaders as unprecedented.

Republicans referred to the recording effort as “Nixonesque,” referring to former Republican President Richard Nixon’s desire to record everything involving him at the White House. I’m uncertain if this is irony, self-loathing behavior or something just randomly laughable, but I’m at a loss for words while watching a Republican use the name of a former two-term (almost) president as an insult. I guess I’m also pretty sure that the relationship between Evers and the Republicans was permanently shattered like Waterford Crystal thrown off the top of the Empire State Building waaaaaaay before this incident.

In any case, here are a few random thoughts for journalism students that don’t delve into the political grandstanding in this case that makes soccer “injuries” look honest by comparison:

 

THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN PUBLIC ANYWAY: Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, made the best point about this situation. Why the hell was this a “private phone call” among three key governmental officials?

(Lueders) said recording a conversation without alerting the other parties isn’t illegal in this state, but is in bad form — and that the nature of the meeting should have pushed the three to talk publicly instead of privately.

“I wouldn’t do that as a journalist, to record someone without them knowing,” Lueders said. “On the other hand, I don’t know what would have been said in that meeting that needed to be kept private.”

Maybe if this is a public meeting, none of this becomes an issue in the first place. Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant, and it would appear to be so in this case.

 

RECORD EVERYTHING, BUT BE HONEST: According to the numerous accounts I’ve read, Richard Nixon was paranoid as hell and believed people were always out to screw him over. If you have spent any time as a reporter in this day and age, I bet Tricky Dick starts making a little more sense in that regard.

I can’t tell you how many times I have written something I got from a source, quoted a source or provide information I got about a source, only to have the person who gave me that information tell me I was wrong. And I did most of my work before the era of people in power calling everything they don’t like “fake news.”

Thus, my advice to students? “Record everything.”

That said, recording is one of those key areas where law and ethics diverge. According to the Digital Media Law Project, 38 states plus the District of Columbia have what is known as one-party consent. This means that if you are on a phone call with another person, you may record it legally without letting that other person know. The other 12 states have two-party consent, which means BOTH parties on the call must know and agree to the recording before it happens. (You can read more on your state’s rules and what happens if your recording across state lines etc. here.)

The law says, “Record them all. Let God sort them out.” Ethics, however, would dictate that secretly recording people kind of undermines trust, as Lueders pointed out. This is why I always tell the students to be up front about their recording. Tell the source, “I would like to record this interview. Is that a problem?” In most cases, sources will be fine with it.

Some folks will be reticent, so I tell the students to explain WHY they want to record the interview: “I want to make sure I don’t make a mistake,” or “I want to be sure the quotes are accurate,” or “I want to protect both of us.” However, the students want to explain it is fine, but at the end of the day, it’s about having a permanent record of what occurred so if the stuff hits the fan, and suddenly everyone is pulling a “Shaggy” on this situation, you have a complete record of what happened.

 

STILL, WATCH OUT FOR YOU FIRST: I totally get why the person recorded the conversation: The Evers administration and the Republicans out here who will rule the assembly in perpetuity, thanks to gerrymandering the likes of which we’ve never seen before, are constantly in a bombastic struggle to define “truth” for the public. I’ll read one story one day and think, “OK, they’re doing X” only to read the next day some recasting of the situation that makes me think it was a dream.

In the end, if you know someone’s going to try to screw you, get a permanent record of reality.

Honestly, I’ve recorded people without their knowledge. I don’t say this with a great deal of pride, but this is what happens when you run a crime beat in an area where people felt no compunction about calling you up to scream at you about coverage. After I almost got smoked once, I considered it an insurance policy.

The first time this happened, a person called the main desk at the newspaper, asking to talk to the person in charge of crime stuff. The staffer sent the person to me, and the caller spent at least five minutes screaming at me about a story we ran. It turns out her kid/brother/friend/whatever was “illegally arrested” (a phrase I still love to this day) and what we wrote needed to be retracted RIGHT NOW.

After mentioning places that I could put my head, which defied the laws of physics, and questioning the lineage of my parents, this woman was not happy with my decision not to acquiesce to her demands. She wanted to speak to my boss.

I gave her his number and he got a much different treatment: A lot of “sir” mentions and some polite questions and so forth. She mentioned how horrible I was and how I said horrible and unspeakable things to her. Of course, my boss brought me in to ask me about this. He bought my version of events, but I swore it would be the last “he said/she said” thing I dealt with at that paper.

I hooked up a tape recorder to the phone and kept it at the ready. When I got the next call transferred, questioning my approach to crime news, I recorded it. After my boss got the complaint about me, I offered to let him listen to the recording. Eventually, that became our routine:

Him: “I got a complaint that you were horrible to (SOMEONE) who was complaining about (WHATEVER I DID).”
Me: “Uh… No… Would you like to hear the recording of the call?”
Him: “Fair enough…”

Still, the most important moment of recording I can recall came when I was an adviser at Ball State University. The school was in the middle of a provost search when one of the three candidates pulled out. The remaining two candidates were relatively polarizing: The president clearly favored one and the faculty and staff favored the other.

Just to back up her notes, the reporter borrowed my recorder for the phone call with the president. She asked the obvious question if the president had planned to restart the search. I can still remember to this day hearing the reporter as, “Is that even an option in your mind?”

The answer was no. We have two qualified candidates and we’re moving forward.

That was the story we ran, and then all hell broke loose.

Faculty were outraged, figuring they were going to get screwed, so they started talking. The president, clearly not wanting this to be a mess, decided the best thing to do was throw the newspaper under the bus.

She issued a statement via email to faculty and staff that basically said, “Look, the kids at the newspaper try really hard, but they’re kids and they screw up stuff. I never said we wouldn’t restart this. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now. So, relax and don’t worry about the mistakes of children.”

Her problem was, we had it recorded. She didn’t know.

To be fair, the student SHOULD have told her we were recording her, and that was a lesson we made clear in the post-game analysis with the reporter. Thus, we gave the president a chance to do the right thing. The editor-in-chief called her and told her that she made us look stupid and that we were asking for a retraction. We’d let it go if she fessed up. She immediately went back to her talking points about the reporter screwing up and how this happens with cub reporters and how she wasn’t mad, but she had to set the record straight.

At that point, he let the cat out of the bag. She paused, said some unprintable things and then asked, “Are you recording me now?”

I remember thinking, “No, but I wish we were…”

In the end, she held firm. We ran her email alongside a transcript of the phone call along with an editorial on the whole thing. She was displeased, but that was on her. If the primary complaint someone has about you recording them is that you’ll report exactly what they said and they don’t like what they said, I have very little sympathy for them.

This leads to the next point…

 

IT’S NOT OUR FAULT YOU’RE A DIPSTICK: The reason we know about this recording in the first place is because the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel put in an open records request for everything associated with a coronavirus meeting between the two sides. Once they asked for everything, including recordings of the meeting, the recording came to light.

(Good side note: In open-records requests, ask for stuff that MIGHT exist, even if you don’t think it does. You might get lucky. In this request, the reporter apparently asked for any recordings of the meeting when requesting documents from Vos as well and got nothing because he didn’t record anything. The request sent to Evers yielded the tape. Short version: It never hurts to ask for stuff.)

Evers did the right thing in turning over the file, even though I’m sure he really didn’t want to. It had to be like that scene in “Silence of the Lambs” when the moth flies out of the basement and basically the killer knew he was screwed. The game was over at that point, and he basically had to brace for impact.

The recording was what I would have expected of divorced parents who were forced into a dinner with their kid at graduation: A lot of people talking past one another, some pointed jabs and the essential “How much longer must we endure this fool?” vibe. One thing that did pop up as a story was Assembly Speaker Robin Vos blaming immigrants for the coronavirus:

MADISON – Assembly Speaker Robin Vos blamed the culture of immigrant populations for a coronavirus outbreak in Racine County, according to a secret recording of his meeting last month with Gov. Tony Evers.

“I know the reason at least in my region is because of a large immigrant population where it’s just a difference in culture where people are living much closer and working much closer,” the Rochester Republican said of an outbreak in Racine County.

Of course, Vos didn’t like the story that pointed this out and tried to move the discussion back to how shameful Evers was for recording the call. He also tried to spin this to make it about how he had a deep concern for people of color who were disproportionately suffering the effects of the virus.

(Hang on… I’m dealing with the vertigo caused by that spin… OK… Phew…)

At the end of the day, neither group looks good and Vos has to deal with what would appear to every Latino group the MJS contacted as a dog-whistle, anti-immigrant blame-fest.

What’s important to remember, however, if you record something as a journalist and someone says something stupid, it’s not your fault.

This is one of the few cases where people aren’t blaming journalists, because the journalist didn’t make the recording. Vos comes the closest, in accusing the paper of not keeping its eye on the ball with the whole “Nixon-esque” recording. However, usually, in a story in which someone records something (telling the source or not) and it turns out the source says something horrible, the outrage is more over the recording or the choice to run the story than it is the horrible thing the person said.

It shouldn’t be, and you shouldn’t feel bad about it.

Your job is to report the facts, getting as close as you can to the purity of truth, in an attempt to inform your readers of something important. Rarely are those revelations something pretty and happy, so someone will be upset.

If a state rep or a city council member or a school board president says something offensive about race, gender, sexual-orientation, socio-economic status or some dude named Chad’s little brother, and you think your readers need to know about it, that’s called editorial discretion. Use it to guide you in your choices.

ALWAYS ASK, “IS THE JUICE WORTH THE SQUEEZE?”: In looking at ethical behavior, I sometimes find myself being a pragmatist more than I would like. Still, that’s because I know I have to live in the real world and not in an ivory tower, subsisting on creeds and mottoes. What I “can” do versus what I “should” do often comes down to a weighing of my options and examination of the ramifications.

(This situation is weird, in that the journalists didn’t make recording, so whatever they picked out of the open record was less on them than it was on the person making the comments and the staffer who recorded it.)

If I record a source, and the source knows the information is on the record, and the source knows I’m recording it, I pretty much have carte blanche to do as I see fit. That’s where editorial discretion comes in. What am I trying to do here?

If I run a story based on one part of an hour-long interview that makes a long-time and trusted source look bad, will I be cutting off my nose to spite my face? Probably. Some folks would say that ethics demand the unveiling of any ill that could showcase the true nature of public figures. Others would say that, short of watching that source kill a guy, you’re not ratting him out because sources like that are hard to find.

This is where I spend more time bean-counting than I might otherwise like. Is one flashy story worth not getting another story again from this source? Is my ability to tell people important things, thanks largely to this source, going to be undermined by me taking a shot across the bow at this guy? Am I protecting a person I shouldn’t be protecting, primarily because he makes me job easier?

This is why journalists who have ethics tend to drink like fish and chew Xanax like Tic-Tacs.

As a journalist, what you do is up to you (and to that extent, your publication/boss/editor/whomever runs the show), so you need to decide for yourself if the juice is worth the squeeze.

 

The “High School Principal at a Porn Store” Theory: Why the public vs. private tweeting debate for journalists doesn’t matter

Tom Jones at the Poynter Institute asked the question that journalists have wrestled with since their profession became the social purview of the world at large:

One of the more complicated issues newsrooms are dealing with these days is employee conduct on social media, especially Twitter.

Here’s what I mean: A reporter tweets something controversial about the news. Is that reporter expressing his or her own opinion? Or are they representing the company they work for?

This issue became an issue again when the Washington Post suspended reporter Felicia Sonmez for tweeting about the 2003 rape allegation against Kobe Bryant within minutes of Bryant’s death breaking as news. The paper eventually determined that Sonmez didn’t break any of its rules with her tweet, even though editor Marty Baron disseminated a memo that urged caution and restraint for Post staff in the future.

As Jones pointed out in his piece, this isn’t a new thing for media folks. Veteran sports journalist Jemele Hill found herself in the middle of a social-media controversy back in 2017when she called the president a “white supremacist” on Twitter and got tagged with a two-week suspension from ESPN. She left the network in 2018 and joined The Atlantic, noting it was a place “where discomfort is OK.” Back in 2013, PR practitioner Justine Sacco found that a single tweet could destroy a person’s life in less than a day. Even after more than a year, Sacco was unable to live down her tweet. It took several more years for her to eventually recover from that single moment.

(This isn’t even just a “media professional thing” in terms of social media leading to concerns in other parts of life. Ask Roseanne Barr, umpire Rob Drake,  comedian Gilbert Gottfried, Elon Musk or any one of a dozen other folks about how social media posts led to ramifications in other parts of their lives.)

Journalists traditionally believe in several key tenets that make life difficult when it comes to this idea of public vs. private person in social media communication:

  • They value openness, which means they don’t want to be silent on a topic that matters to them, hide information or allow themselves to be censored.
  • They value the sharing of information with interested audience members.
  • They believe in being involved in stuff, so when something is happening, they feel the need to chime in.
  • They like to produce content, and in most “traditional media” formats, they don’t get (or have to listen to) audience feedback.

Take all of this together and you’ll realize that it’s not all that hard to see why journalists end up on social media a great deal and why it is they have trouble with their employers after a tweet goes bad.

The rules that dictate what they can or can’t they do versus what should or shouldn’t they do is kind of a random mishmash of media company norms, HR memos and a desire to stop audiences from freaking out. Jones notes:

Baron wrote that with social media, the Post should remember this: “(1) The reputation of The Post must prevail over any one individual’s desire for expression. (2) We should always exercise care and restraint.”

In other words, it feels as if Baron is telling reporters to use their heads, to be smart, to watch their tone, to not say anything that might cause an issue.

Makes sense … until you realize that what one person considers a valid take might be inappropriate to someone else. After all, isn’t that what just happened at the Post?

Sort of, but not really.

Here is why Baron’s memo, Jones’ reaction and social media policies in general fall short in splitting the baby between allowing journalists to interact with the audience and a desire to prevent chaos and dystopia from reigning supreme in the Twitterverse:

You Can’t Entirely Know Your Audience: Great reporters used to know their audiences like the backs of their hands. Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko and their ilk prided themselves in knowing “their readers” and being great at delivering things to them that mattered. Folks like that existed in many publications, I’m sure. (George Hesselberg and Pat “Snoop” Simms, both formerly of the Wisconsin State Journal,  are two folks I got to know who had that finger on the pulse of the readers as they wrote their stories and columns.)

Many reporters, however, relied less on the audience needs and more on the news values or interest elements associated with journalism education to drive their approach to content. Even more, the idea that we would stoop to going through “market research” to figure out how we should cover certain things or what we should cover was an affront to some folks that saw this as an impingement on their freedom of the press.

Today, we have more data than ever to help us figure out  where our clicks come from. (The Dynamics of Writing would like to give a shout out to whatever the heck “Han dot nl” is, as for some reason, it’s driving a ton of traffic to the site from the Netherlands.) We know which posts draw the most clicks, the most likes and the most shares.

That said, we still don’t know our actual audience and here’s why: Once the content is out of our hands, we have no say over what happens to it. What we think is OK for “our audience” doesn’t matter in some cases, because other readers out there can still access it and will still freak out over it.

Case in point: I generally curse in every day life, knowing that most of the people around me are used to it. When I started this blog, I was asked by SAGE to eliminate “unnecessary curse words,” as some of the people who buy the book and read the blog go to far more conservative universities, religious colleges and places that generally have more couth than I do. I tamped that down (as best I could) and stuck with only “necessary cursing” to meet the needs of my audience.

That said, I have no idea at all why people in the Netherlands are consistently reading this blog. For all I know, I might end up having the gendarmes after me (or pikemen or whatever…) for violating some sort of social concerns I don’t know about. I’m glad these readers are here, don’t get me wrong, but I never started this blog with the idea of rocking the Dutch market. They aren’t my intended audience, but it’s not like I can do much to stop them from showing up or seeing stuff.

The larger point is this: If you send something out that you believe to be relatively appropriate to people you think are going to be reading it, you have no way of preventing it from going to a completely different group of people and having everything go to hell in a speedboat.

The “High School Principal at a Porn Store” Theory of Private vs. Public: Journalists like to argue that their social media feeds are their individual, private personas as opposed to a public representation of their work as media practitioners.

In a vacuum, I get that, as there should be a separation between job-related life and life-related life for all of us. It gets a little dicier when you consider that in both their job and their social media lives, reporters are essentially doing similar things (sharing content) in similar ways (social media, typing stuff etc.). Still, we don’t give up all of our rights to be regular people just because we cover the news.

The bigger problem is that human beings don’t operate in a vacuum of life and we can’t always build an unbreakable firewall in our brains like this. We can’t “unsee” things or discount them based on the spheres in which they happen. This leads me to the theory outlined above.

Let’s say you’re driving down a fairly empty stretch of interstate late Saturday night and you blow a tire. You pull over to the only business with a well-lit parking lot: A giant “adult book store” or porn palace or whatever you want to call it. As you’re sitting there, waiting for Triple-A to come and fix your car, you see the principal of your old high school exiting the building. He’s carrying a giant duffel bag full of pornographic DVDs and an inflatable “partner” doll dressed like a Catholic school girl. He doesn’t see you, he gets in his car and he drives away.

Theoretically, you should be able to compartmentalize this: He’s a private citizen, during his off hours, doing nothing illegal, so what’s the big deal? You should put this away as one more interaction with him and ignore it as it relates to his work with the school and your interactions with him when you were in school.

In a practical sense, however, all you can think is, “EEEEEEEWWWW!!! PRINCIPAL JONES! MY EYES! MY EYES!”

Everything you thought about this guy is now cast in a completely different light. You start rethinking every comment he ever made about anyone in a different way. You also probably start washing your hands like Lady MacBeth with OCD, remembering the number of “high fives” you got from him as you walked down the hallways between classes.

Again, nothing illegal happened. Hell, you don’t even know if anything horribly sketchy will happen, as this could be part of a giant prank or a lost bet. However, that’s not going to make you feel any better about the situation.

Just because we pretend that a wall exists between the public and the private spheres for the benefit of trying to justify our choices to other people, it doesn’t necessarily follow that everyone will graciously make that same distinction once they see what you put out there. People decide how they want to see us based on what they see of us. Claiming something is personal or not part of our career or whatever doesn’t absolve us of the perceptual damage that exists in the minds of others.

A Case of the Man Keeping Us Down: The more journalists feel forces beyond their control are suppressing them, the more likely they are to push back on something. It’s a response learned from years of having people they report on saying, “You don’t need to know that” or “You aren’t going to get that.” It’s also probably hardwired into our genetics at some level, just like being nosy.

Policies like this one that seems to say, “We’re watching you” can lead journalists to feel that need to push back against it, even if they aren’t entirely interested in engaging in the behavior the policy dictates. In other words, even if I’m not a journalist on Twitter who feels it necessary to tweet about whatever is coming into my mind, the minute you try to stop me from doing so is the minute I’m going to be upset about it.

It also doesn’t help that the policies are fluid and lack a sense of  “X actions = Y consequences.” Do I think that the timing of Sonmez’s tweet was particularly brilliant? No. Do I think the consequences were a bit much? Yes. Can I find a clear path through Barron’s memo or the WaPo policy that tells me who was right? Not a chance.

In some ways, this kind of reminds me of the old-school version of Catholic confession, in that it was never clear how the priest knew EXACTLY how many “Hail Marys” or “Our Fathers” were necessary to demonstrate proper atonement for each specific sin. It seemed like a mixture of how upset the priest was, how penitent the confessor was and how much time was left before mass started.

When my job (or my eternal soul) is on the line, I guess I’d like a little more clarity on how the rules apply and how I should know that I’ve got things nailed down appropriately.

—

Just like anyone else, journalists are going to be judged on their statements in a public setting and like a whole lot of folks, we tend to think our opinion needs to be shared with a lot of people in a public way. Since social media allows EVERYONE to play, it can be difficult to tell people who share opinions and write publicly that they can’t play or that they have to follow different rules.

Like most other things we’re all grappling with in this field, things are more likely to be messy than easy as we figure out what we SHOULD do after we bump into a lot of things we probably SHOULDN’T do.

 

A judge, a professor and a “wiry marathon runner” want your vote: 3 tips for avoiding stereotyping descriptors in your writing

Election Day is here and I need to pick several folks for state and local elections. Knowing almost nothing about our Supreme Court nominees here in Wisconsin, I did a little digging around for some information on who is running and what they represent.

In voting for a state Supreme Court election, which of the following items do you think voters would most care about learning first?

  1. Previous experience as an assistant attorney general.
  2. A history of work with crime victims, including a stint as the executive director of a statewide victim’s advocacy office
  3. Being an awesome high school athlete 38 years ago

If you picked “3,” you’re thinking like the Associated Press was when publishing profiles of the candidates for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. Here is the opening paragraph of candidate Jill Karofsky’s portion of the “get to know the candidates” bio:

(Jill) Karofsky is a wiry marathon runner who has completed two Iron Man competitions. She also won the state doubles tennis championship in 1982 for Middleton High School.

Compare this to how Justice Dan Kelly is described off the top:

Then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, appointed (Daniel) Kelly to the Supreme Court in 2016 to replace the retiring David Prosser. An attorney by trade, he represented Republican lawmakers in a federal trial over whether they illegally gerrymandered Wisconsin’s legislative district boundaries in 2011. He’s also a member of The Federalist Society, a conservative organization that advocates for a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

If you think this could be a case of the incumbent getting a bit more focus on the job, consider the opening of the third candidate’s bio. Meet Ed Fallone:

(Ed) Fallone has taught law at Marquette University for 27 years. His mother was raised in Mexico and he has served on the boards of Voces de la Frontera Accion, the lobbying arm of immigrant advocacy group Voces de la Frontera, and Centro Legal, a Milwaukee nonprofit that provides low-cost legal services.

I’m not a feminist scholar by trade, but if you can’t see an imbalance here in how the candidates are being introduced, you’re not paying attention. If I had to summarize them by how they were portrayed in those first paragraphs it would be like this:

  • Dan Kelly: Conservative jurist and incumbent Supreme Court Justice.
  • Ed Fallone: Veteran law professor with an interest in immigrant advocacy.
  • Jill Karofsky: Don’t let that flowing robe fool you! She’s athletic as hell under there!

Also, I went through all of the other two candidates’ biographies and I can’t find a single use of a physical descriptor in there, except in Karofsky’s opening paragraph and the use of “wiry:”

I’m not sure why it matters that she’s “wiry” or what that has to do with her jurisprudence, but apparently the writer thought it somehow mattered. I’ve heard the argument that descriptions often “humanize” people in short profiles, but consider this information instead:

Judge Karofsky received the WI Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s “Voices of Courage Award,” was named the WI Victim/Witness Professional Association’s “Professional of the Year,” and earned a “Significant Impact” Award from a local organization dedicated to ending domestic violence. She currently serves on the Wisconsin Judicial Education Committee and chairs the Violence Against Women STOP Grant committee. She previously co-chaired the Attorney General’s Sexual Assault Response Team, and served on the Governor’s Council on Domestic Abuse, the WI Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board, the Wisconsin Crime Victims Council, and the Dane County Big Brothers/Big Sisters Board of Directors.

I doubt that the writer had chosen this route of description on purpose, but it does paint a series of incongruent pictures in which gender appears to be the distinguishing element. As always, the point of this blog is not to beat up on journalists, but rather to teach you how to avoid these problems in the first place. Here are some helpful thoughts on potentially problematic descriptors:

Would you use the same type of descriptor if another race/gender/group was involved? One of my favorite books, “Ball Four,” talked about the aspect of race during a time in which these things were not as openly discussed across a large spectrum of people. In one conversation, one of author Jim Bouton’s teammates noted he wouldn’t mind that newspapers referred to him as the team’s black first baseman if they would only refer to his replacement as the team’s white first baseman.

Instead, it was a first baseman and a black first baseman, thus indicating one was “normal” and the other was an oddity.

When considering descriptors, ask yourself if you would use descriptive elements like this on all people involved in the story. For example, based on this photo, a writer might refer to Fallone as “diminutive” if the writer felt a physical description were warranted in discussing Supreme Court candidates. (I got nothing to describe Kelly, physically, despite my best efforts. I was stuck between “broad-chested” and “square-headed,” neither of which worked, but you get the point.)

Think about how an approach would work across gender, racial, ethnic or other lines before deciding to make one person the standard for “normal” and the others anomalies.

Does the descriptor add something important to the story? In some cases, personal differences can add value to a story. For example, you can’t tell the story of Thurgood Marshall’s life without noting things like how he was the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. His position as a pioneer and a ground-breaking figure adds value to the story. However, merely tossing in a descriptor like, “Jim Jones, a black man, said he thinks the Milwaukee Brewers will win the World Series this year,” doesn’t add value and just engages in “othering.”

In the case of the “wiry marathon runner” and high school tennis champion who is running for the state’s Supreme Court, I’d be hard-pressed to figure out what value describing her athletic achievements have here, particularly right up top. If there was some sort of “American Ninja Warrior” competition required as part of the election, this might make sense. However, since it’s not, I’m probably going to want to know more about her brains than her brawn.

Does the descriptor lend itself to a stereotypical connotation that likely does more harm than good? When you write about someone in a way in which a descriptor could lend itself to a stereotype, you have to balance the importance of the descriptor against the value the descriptor brings to the story.

When Georgetown coach John Thompson won the 1984 NCAA championship, reporters asked him about becoming the first black coach to win the title. Thompson replied that if the indication was that he was the first person of color to have the acumen to do it, he found that insulting. He noted that many other people of color, years earlier, had just as good of a set of coaching skills as he did, but were never afforded the opportunity to coach, due to the racism of the time.

A study I did years ago with a master’s student of mine looked at how college quarterbacks were described in their draft previews and we found some clear and stereotypical disparities. White quarterbacks received high marks for intelligence, leadership and other similar “mental” elements of the game. Black quarterbacks received high marks for physical or “natural gifts” while receiving negative comments on their intellect. In doing this, we argued, the writers were reinforcing racial stereotypes like these:

This is not to say you can never use a descriptor, for fear of stereotyping someone. However, what it is saying is to make sure that you think before you do it and weigh the “cost vs. benefit” of that descriptor in your work.

 

 

Crime doesn’t pay: Some newsrooms decide to stop running click-bait mugshot galleries

From Poynter and the Marshall Project:

Online mugshot galleries, where news organizations post rows of people who were arrested, once seemed like an easy moneymaker for struggling newsrooms: Each reader click to the next image translated to more page views and an opportunity for more advertising dollars.

But faced with questions about the lasting impact of putting these photos on the internet, where they live forever, media outlets are increasingly doing away with the galleries of people on the worst days of their lives.

Last month, the Houston Chronicle became the latest major paper to take that plunge. At an all-hands staff meeting, the paper’s editors announced their decision to stop posting slideshows of people who have been arrested but not convicted—and who are still presumed innocent under law.

The media outlets discussed in this piece by Poynter aren’t cutting ties to mugshots like this, as editors note in the story:

The paper will still use booking photos when they have news value. Lorando said the paper does not generally remove or edit stories that were accurate when they were published.

A criminal mugshot is like any other tool in your journalistic toolbox: You want to use it for the right reason and be able to explain how it helps your audience understand the story you want to tell. I know that I’ve run more than a few mugs with stories I’ve done or encouraged students to include them with stories at student papers I’ve advised.

In one case, a man suspected of drunken driving ran over a young boy who was on a bicycle. The man tried to speed off with the kid stuck under the car, dragging the boy for several yards. Neighbors in the area came running out to stop the guy and get the kid help.

Then, they turned on man, dragging him out of the car and beating him bloody. The mug shot of this man told a story of a person who was both an accused criminal as well as a victim of a crime.  We felt the image added perspective to the situation. This was especially true when the police were looking for people who were involved in the beating, only to find that nobody in the area saw anything…

Another beating story ran at the Ball State Daily News, in which six female students at the school dragged another woman out of a party and attacked her. The police described the beating as “deplorable.” We ran all six mugshots across the top of the paper to showcase who was involved. I can still see the smirks on two of these women’s faces, looks that seemed to say, “You can’t touch me. My Daddy has the world’s best lawyer.”

The mugshot is a public record, and as such, you have a legal right to use it. However, this is where the ethics of journalism come into play and you need to ask yourself if you SHOULD use it.

A few key questions to ask before using a mugshot, or running any kind of content for that matter, might include:

  • Does this add value to the story I want to tell for my readers?
  • Will my choice do more harm than good?
  • What are the potential ramifications of my actions, particularly ramifications that are of a long-term variety?
  • Why do I want to do this?
  • What is the best counter-argument to the choice I want to make right now? Is it good enough to flip the argument?

 

 

Cropping, ‘Shopping and Racism in the Media: Four things to consider in the wake of the AP’s “white people only” photo

The Associated Press issued an apology Friday for its photo of several climate-change activists that had led to charges of racism:

An AP photographer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland took a picture Friday of five activists, including the well-known Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and Ugandan Vanessa Nakate, who were there to discuss climate change. Preparing to send the image, the photographer cropped out Nakate, leaving a picture of four white women before a scenic mountain backdrop.

The initial explanation for the cropping was that it enabled a close-up of Thunberg, and that it removed a distraction — a building behind where Nakate was standing.

The image, shown here solely for educational purposes, gives you both the original (bottom) and the cropped version (top) (via Black Voice News):

APRace2

The backdrop on the photo is busy, but the crop didn’t solve the problem of making it better. You still have the building in the background, the weird pole thing is still sticking out of the person on the left’s head and you have a tree growing out of the shoulders of the two folks on the right. The only real “crop” that would have solved much of anything would be a slight crop on to the shoulder of Nakate to remove the random person from behind the group.

A similarly bad decision, although with the intention of yielding opposite results, took place at my alma mater about 20 years ago. In attempting to make its student body look “more diverse” on the cover of its application brochure, the University of Wisconsin-Madison PhotoShopped the face of a black student into a crowd shot:

PhotoshopShabazz

The decision led to viral levels of mockery, including in The Onion, with its “Black Guy PhotoShopped In” story, which explained how a university in its piece had to go through “through hundreds of school-newspaper and yearbook file photos before we found a picture of a black guy.”

Madison initially tried to squeeze through on this one, before eventually deciding to destroy the entire run of “‘Shopped” catalogs and rerun it without the alteration.

If nothing else, these incidents demonstrate the awkwardness that media professionals have while dealing with issues of race and visuals. In the case of the AP, officials there noted that everyone will be engaging in racial sensitivity and awareness seminars of some sort. In addition, the organization is challenging people to better engage issues of race and its portrayal in its media efforts. (In short, I’m guessing the unvarnished message was, “Oh crap… Let’s NOT do something THAT STUPID again!”)

The problem with just calling for “awareness” and “sensitivity” is that organizations like AP already have these kinds of statements in play. If you read the SPJ Code of Ethics, it gives you this:

Boldly tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience. Seek sources whose voices we seldom hear.

In addition, the NPPA Code of Ethics includes this:

Be complete and provide context when photographing or recording subjects. Avoid stereotyping individuals and groups. Recognize and work to avoid presenting one’s own biases in the work.

Simply put, the codes of ethics already tell media practitioners to show the whole story, make sure not to mess with reality and be aware of diversity issues. None of this should come as a shock to professional journalists in the textual and visual realms.

Rather than beat up on AP, here a few points that might help you as you examine this situation and look for ways to avoid this kind of problematic outcome for yourself in the future:

Read the codes: This is pretty self-explanatory, but it helps to remind yourself from time to time what your discipline’s instruction manual gives you for guidance.  If you keep up on these and refresh your memory about them every so often, you can make sure you’re doing the best possible work in the best possible way.

Paranoia is your friend: I use this one a lot, and to be honest, it feels a little awkward to use it here. It would be so much better if we all had diversity, compassion and awareness on the front burner of everything we do in media work. I absolutely believe that. I also know that the ideal and the practical often diverge in daily life, so consider this item as a solid back-up plan.

I find myself asking this question a lot when I’m publishing anything, be it a blog post or a book: “How could this go horribly wrong and really screw me?” The answers don’t always lead to brilliant success, but they do help me avoid a lot of really bad failure.

In short, look at what you are about to do and see how many ways your actions could lead to people becoming upset. For me, I tend to spiral out at least three turns, to the point of wondering what people who tweet in nothing but caps would have to say. I then think, “OK, how much of a defense can I put up when that happens?” If I don’t like the odds and the outcomes, I look at the alternatives until I find one that seems the least painful with the best likelihood of success and I go for it.

Not exactly awe-inspiring or speaking to the better angels of media glory, but it works.

Diversity isn’t a buzzword: We’ve talked about this before on the blog, but it bears repeating and it should be expanded upon. The idea of having a diverse set of individuals in a newsroom or an office or anywhere else where media decisions are made is to provide a wide array of experiences that can inform upon decision-making. It’s not about checking a box or looking good in a group photo. It’s so that the people in the content’s decision-making zone reflect the people for whom they are making content decisions.

If you are lucky enough to work for an organization that espouses that kind of goal and has created a workforce to match it, this is where asking and listening can be a huge benefit both now and later. I don’t have a perfect environment of that nature on a daily basis, but I have been lucky enough to work with people over time who make me “open the aperture” of my mind a lot more.

For example, when I’m dealing with issues of gender, I can hear Tracy Everbach’s voice in the back of my head, poking at the choices I’m making. In terms of LGBTQ issues, several folks who have guest blogged for me sit in my mind and let me play out scenarios of what I should say or how I should say it. Former students and colleagues’ words also rattle around in my head when it comes to issues of race, faith and other similar topics.

Better yet, if I’m not 100% sure on what to do, I can call or text or email them and ask for advice.

Media education goes beyond the tools: We talk a lot in both books about finding ways to put “tools in your toolbox” when it comes to media writing and reporting. The idea is that you can learn a skill that will benefit you as you ply your trade in whichever area of the field you wish to enter.

It pays not to take that metaphor too literally, however, as knowing how to nail down the 5W’s and 1H, take photos or capture video isn’t the start and end of journalism. That’s why we don’t call our Visual Media Design class “How To Use InDesign” or our Photography I course “Nikon and Photoshop Proficiency.” The tools help you do the job, but it’s the human beings and their knowledge of the field that matter more.

The decision made in the case of the AP’s photo is a perfect microcosm of this distinction. The “nuts-and-bolts, technical-rule, use-the-tool approach” can clearly justify the idea of cropping Nakate out. Tighter crops are technically better and the goal of eliminating distracting elements is technically better. That “tool” approach could also justify PhotoShopping out the background distractions or digitally moving Nakate closer to the others.

However, journalism says those would all be no-nos.

The “journalism-as-a-craft” approach would clearly say we don’t alter reality to make the images better. It would also say that social and ethical ramifications of the decisions we make should take a front-row seat in what we do. Thus, cropping the photo (or any of the other things I mentioned above) would do more harm than good, so leave it alone.

Your media education is more than the sum of the technical skills you add to your expertise. It’s about seeing both the forest and the trees and knowing when to see each as important.

Dinner with Hitler: How a Q&A with a college newspaper became a national story and an ethical dilemma

While interviewing Grand Valley State University’s new offensive coordinator, the sports editor of the student newspaper threw in the kind of softball question that hundreds of journalists had asked before:

KV: So you graduated from Drury with a degree in History, you’re a history guy. If you could have dinner with three historical figures, living or dead, who would they be? And I’m ruling out football figures.

MB: This is probably not going to get a good review, but I’m going to say Adolf Hitler. It was obviously very sad and he had bad motives, but the way he was able to lead was second-to-none. How he rallied a group and a following, I want to know how he did that. Bad intentions of course, but you can’t deny he wasn’t a great leader.

Morris Berger’s answer to Kellen Voss’ question drew national attention to the school, the football program and Berger. It also forced the staff of The Lanthorn to decide what was the best way to handle a story that was quickly becoming a hot potato.

“When you have a Q&A especially, the piece is meant to be raw and personal,” Lanthorn Editor In Chief Nick Moran said Friday in an email interview. “We don’t edit answers and the questions asked help give a glimpse into the source. So when I first saw it, I certainly knew it was an odd, questionable answer, but we ran it with the rest of the piece. Honestly, when we first saw it, our thought was, ‘Why wouldn’t we run this?'”

Moran, a third-year student double majoring in multimedia journalism and communication studies, works with a staff of about 45-50 students at The Lanthorn to cover GVSU’s campuses in Allendale and Grand Rapids, Michigan. In most cases, the coverage doesn’t receive much attention outside of that area, but he soon came to realized that this time, things would be different.

“We first knew it was bound to take off somewhat on Sunday night when Fox 17 ran an online story and broadcast segment on it,” Moran said. “When Fox 17 runs a story here in Grand Rapids, the other two local outlets are going to cover it too. So we knew it would at least get views in the Grand Rapids area, but then it grew. The Detroit Free Press called, making it state-wide. Then we saw it on ESPN, YahooSports, Barstool and more. Then the national media reached out, like the Washington Post, CNN and the Huffington Post. Eventually, it even went international with the Guardian covering it as well.”

Along with the attention came mounting pressure on the publication. An official in the athletic department asked Moran and his staff to pull the story or at least cut the line about Hitler. Initially, the paper acquiesced, something the staff outlined in its explanatory editorial later that week:

When confronted by a university official in a position of influence, the “student” portion of “student journalist” kicked in first. In a lapse of journalistic vision, we removed the portion in question. We quickly realized that was a mistake.

Moran said he worked with his staff and his adviser to determine the best way to decide if The Lanthorn should go back to the original version or stick with the edited version. After discussing the issue with multiple people, including some journalism professors, Moran had the original piece put back on the website.

“From the get-go, I was sure we had to reinstate the piece to its full version,” Moran said. “The support and wisdom around me provided me with the rationale to back up my gut-instinct and the confidence to stick with it.”

The university suspended Berger, pending an investigation into the comments. Berger later resigned, saying he “expressed regret” over the comments he made regarding Hitler.  At each stage, The Lanthorn was at the forefront of the coverage.

“I’m very proud we had the chance to scoop some major outlets,” Moran said. “It was an opportunity for us to show the community, state and country that student journalists can tango with even the professionals.”

Moran said while some outside of the GVSU community have posted negative comments, people on campus have been generally supportive of the paper’s stand.

“In my journalism classes at the very least, a lot of students respected the decision we made to stick to our guns on keeping the comments in the Q&A,” he said. “We’ve even heard from administrators that we made the right call, with the president sending us a letter to assure us.”

“We’re incredibly fortunate to be part of a university that respects freedom of press so openly,” he added. “I know this isn’t the case everywhere.”

Moran said the lesson learned here is to make a decision that can be supported and stick with it.

“As young journalists, we should have an idea of what is the right thing to do, or maybe an organization you work for has those standards,” he said. “In our case (and maybe yours), the ‘student’ portion of ‘student journalist’ may react first, but if you assess the situation as an ethical, professional journalist, there’s time to remedy that. In doing so, be transparent. Your audience may not appreciate if you made a mistake, but many of them will respect you acknowledging it and correcting it if you explain the process.”

 

 

 

Jim Lehrer’s rules matter now more than ever