This Wednesday I am scheduled to speak at a breakfast meeting of the Smaller Business Association of New England. I’m honored to do it. But I am growing increasingly nervous.
Here’s why.
Several weeks ago, when I agreed to speak, I suggested two topics.
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First, I figured I would talk about the Rhode Island economy. This job affords me the unique opportunity to speak on a regular basis with economists, government officials and business leaders. Leaning heavily on feedback from such people, I feel I can address – at least briefly – our state’s business climate.
But my out, the subject I knew I would feel most confident discussing, would be journalism. After all, I have written at least 1,500 news and feature stories, 450 editorials and roughly 150 columns. A few minutes on the state of journalism today? No problem, I figured.
What on earth was I thinking?
I hadn’t planned on Jayson Blair self-destructing, dragging The New York Times, of all papers, along with him. Blair’s apparent penchant for making some things up and borrowing material from other papers has contributed mightily to a general consensus that journalists are not to be trusted.
And even if we could pass off Blair as a troubled individual, a renegade reporter gone wrong, there was more coming out of the hallowed halls of The New York Times.
A week ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer Rick Bragg said he often relied on interns or stringers to do some of his reporting, including a well-publicized incident in which he wrote a lengthy feature story about oystermen on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Bragg admitted to the Washington Post that he did little first-hand reporting for the piece, relying rather on the work of a freelance writer.
Most disturbing to me was Bragg’s cavalier attitude in rationalizing his approach. He reasoned that this is simply how it’s done, particularly by national correspondents like him. He drew a sharp distinction between reporting and writing – as if one does not necessarily have to be connected to the other.
Bragg quit The Times as the story unfolded, suggesting that he had become a scapegoat for a paper trying to save face in the aftermath of Jayson Blair.
Bragg has a lucrative book deal on the table. So he will continue to write. I will continue to read.
But as a journalist, Bragg and others, like Mike Barnicle at the Boston Globe, who lost his job for allegedly mixing fiction with fact, leave me to try and explain to those who may ask what is now a very fair question: ‘Do you people follow any basic rules … does integrity mean anything to a journalist?’
The answer is yes.
I do believe Jayson Blair is an aberration, a troubled young man. But it’s folks like Bragg and Barnicle who demand a more detailed explanation.
My take is that they stopped being journalists somewhere along the way. They got too big – even for The Times and the Boston Globe. If the reporting was getting in their way, was slowing them down, then they were no longer reporters.
Little help from real world
I wondered what Linda Levin, the chair of the department of journalism at URI, planned to tell her next batch of aspiring journalists about the importance of ethics in journalism.
“That’s a good question, and the answer should be a no-brainer,” said Levin. “Don’t copy other people’s work without attribution; don’t make up quotes; don’t lie about the dateline of a story and so forth.”
But enforcing these issues, said Levin, is another matter.
“I spot check sources in stories and in research papers when I have reason to be suspicious about them,” she said. “The students know that I do this. Rarely have I found a student reporter who did not actually interview a source.… Once in a while I have discovered a student research paper with large sections copied from book sources. This usually is the result of sloppy footnotes and bibliography or a lack of understanding that all pieces of information must have a cited source. The punishment for these ethical transgressions? A failure, of course, followed by a stern warning that if they commit these sins in the real world, they get fired.”
But Levin and others in academia aren’t getting much help from the real world.
“Unfortunately, the behavior of the editors in the real world is making it difficult for the editors in the classroom,” she said. “If students see working journalists breaching their profession’s ethics with little or no punishment, their incentives to be good journalists disappear. When a reporter whose work virtually breached every ethic known to journalists finally does get fired and then becomes a celebrity with a million-dollar book contract … we journalism professors find it almost futile to believe that if we can teach students ethics that they will listen. My suggestion: Fire the editors who are allowing reporters to be unethical. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it?”
It does. So that’s what I’ll tell my audience this week. That it’s really about accountability.
I believe lapses in journalism are far more the exception than the rule. But when they happen, they should result in punishment – not reward.
