Images and false portrayals: Rick Paulas reports that KTVU apologized for using an image from a murder victim’s Facebook account.
The news media often treat subjects differently according to race, writes Paulas, portraying black families as living in poverty and being involved in crime. This has “real-life consequences” and sways attitudes.
Public reaction on a heavy news day: Ariel Edwards-Levy reports Huffpost survey results during a day of presidential setbacks.
“Some were raptly following the latest political setbacks,” writes Edwards-Levy. “Others were burned out, overwhelmed or uninterested or just didn’t trust the media.”
To journalists, it was “all-consuming.”
Good news on media trust: Indira Lakshmanan and Rick Edmonds report that trust in media scored higher since last year and “the great majority of Americans trust their local news sources.”
A Poynter Media Trust survey finds “that the president’s attempts to discredit the news may be having less effect a year and a half into his presidency.”
Media audiences drop, except radio: Michael Barthel reports Pew Research Center findings for every major sector of the U.S. news media for 2017.
“Radio was the only sector studied that did not show an audience decline, by several measures,” writes Barthel. Newspapers, cable TV, network TV, local TV and digital-native news were all down by five to 15 percent.
Seven steps for a free press: “Let’s help people imagine, just for a second, a world without their regular news sources,” write Melody Kramer and Betsy O’Donovan, who propose news blackouts.
Rebuild a national belief that journalism is a public service, they write, not public enemy number one. News organizations must work together to do that.
Readers ruffled by New York Times story on Los Angeles: Sydney Smith reports that two New York Times travel editors apologized for painting Los Angeles as “the source of all useless items in the world,” including Jesus statues.
Readers thought the article “dismissive of Latino culture and cliched in its portayal of the city.” This was considered offensive.
Recycled interviews deemed unethical: Sydney Smith writes that National Public Radio discovered a freelance reporter laced old interviews with current stories without disclosure.
Listeners might have thought the comments were new, said NPR, but some were months or years old. That was misleading, said NPR, and not in line with editorial standards. NPR will not use the reporter’s work in the future.
Reporting on opioids: Maia Szalavitz reports that journalists fail to understand the complexities of opioid addiction and alternative treatment for pain or addiction.
The pharmaceutical industry “flooded the country with opioids and excellent journalism has exposed this part of the problem,” she writes. “But journalists need to become more familiar with who is most at risk of addiction and why — and to understand the utter disconnect between science and policy — if we are to accurately inform our audience.”
Journalists are not the enemy: The Boston Globe’s editorial board publishes its response to President Trump’s attack on the media.
More than 350 news outlets joined the Globe’s move to support a free press.
“A central pillar of President Trump’s politics is a sustained assault on the free press,” writes the Globe. “Journalists are not classified as fellow Americans, but rather ‘the enemy of the people.’ This relentless assault on the free press has dangerous consequences.”
More on covering hate: Amanda Darrach finds a culture gap between young technology reporters who think trolling rhetoric is funny, while older reporters take it “totally seriously.”
“Our system is geared towards media manipulation on a massive scale,” she writes. “There are a lot of reasons why we’re in the mess that we’re in. Some of it has to do with reporters making bad choices, but the system is just set up to be manipulated.”
Bottom line: “It’s our job to document the human condition, and that includes the ugly parts.”
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists 