Building an ethical culture at NPR: The NPR standards & practices editor tells Victoria Kwan about language usage, social media practices and urgent ethics issues.
“The bottom line is still fact-checking and verification,” says editor Mark Memmott. “Your credibility as a journalist will depend upon how well yo do those things, more than whether you’re the most clever writer or the fastest to spot a viral tweet.”
A thriving weekly newspaper: Revenue tripled in three years at the Malheur Enterprise, with in-depth local reporting and an ad salesperson.
Tom Goldman describes the turnaround and the prize-winning journalism. There’s an appetite for good reporting, Goldman writes, and the paper’s editor and publisher “has earned his readers’ trust with his devotion to bedrock principles of journalism.” He’s called “the ideal community journalist.”
An accuracy checklist: Mark Memmott lists 13 things to double-check in a story, followed at National Public Radio.
It is “a reminder of things we all know we should do,” he writes, like checking names, dates, quotes and locations.
“When an NPR journalist says something is ready for editing, that journalist is confirming that all such double-checking has been done,” he writes.
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.
Covering white supremacist views: Elizabeth Jensen writes about public outrage over NPR’s coverage of “Unite The Right2,” a racist rally.
NPR was correct to cover the rally, she writes, though “the interview was painful to hear; it had me yelling at the radio, as I know many others did.”
She concludes: “NPR has decided it will air these interviews. I am on the fence about whether they are necessary. But if NPR is going to go that route, it needs to strengthen its practices for a more responsible execution.”
By Casey Bukro
I’m a sucker for stories about news ombudsmen, or public editors or readers representatives, even though they are branded these days. I can’t help myself. It’s a compulsion, an addiction.
Think about it: An ombudsman might walk up to the top boss and tell him he’s wrong. She might pick through the details of a complicated story, then defend a reporter for doing a thankless, difficult or even dangerous job, or discover that a reporter did not go far enough to find the truth, and then say so publicly.
It’s almost heroic.
I suppose I also admire ombudsmen because what they do is so idealistic: speaking up without fear or favor, letting the chips fall where they may.
Maybe that’s why there are only about 20 of them working at American news outlets today, according to a Politico article, “The State of the Ombudsman in 2015.” That’s about half as many as a decade ago, according to USA Today.
Still, ombudsmen in the U.S. and elsewhere trudge on.
Kathy English, public editor of the Toronto Star in Canada, recently wrote an article titled, “So what does the public editor do?” Readers had asked her to explain her job, which she’s done for eight years.
Fareed Zakaria (Getty photo)
By Casey Bukro
Fareed Zakaria finds himself the target of anonymous bloggers who accuse him of plagiarism.
Zakaria says he is not a plagiarist, but media carrying his columns on international affairs — Newsweek, The Washington Post and Politico — have posted corrections or editor’s notes advising readers that Zakaria had not sufficiently attributed sources for material in some of his columns.
Now take a step back for a minute to ponder how the case underscores differences in the way journalism works now, compared with just a few years ago.
In the past, even a whiff of plagiarism was a firing offense. The hammer came down hard in most cases. Mike Barnicle was fired from the Boston Globe for plagiarism. Jayson Blair was booted from the New York Times for similar offenses, plagiarism and fabrication.
And some editors in the past would dismiss information from anonymous sources as lacking credibility unless identity and motivation were known.
In the Zakaria case, the sources are bloggers known only as BlippoBlappo and CrushingBort who consider themselves plagiarism watchdogs at Our Bad Media. They cited 50 examples of what they considered insufficient attribution in Zakaria’s columns. They describe themselves as two young men who are not journalists.
Zakaria also appears on CNN in a program focusing on international affairs. He is widely respected and seen or read on multiple platforms. And that’s part of the problem, say the anonymous plagiarism sleuths. They say Zakaria is treated with a deference that is not shown to minor league journalists. He continues to write columns for media that attached warnings to some of his past columns.
Maybe that makes what he did correctable or excusable. Another new slant on journalism as it is done today, when the focus is more on finance and new business models. And maybe some editors believe lack of attribution is not plagiarism.
The Columbia Journalism Review points out that “outcry within the journalistic community, meanwhile, has been unexpectedly mute, with many discussions focused on the semantic question of whether Zakaria’s mistakes constitute what some news organizations consider an unforgivable sin.”
Zakaria admitted to a “mistake” in 2012, but said that for the most part he uses information that is generally or widely known.
In tweaking its code of ethics, the Society of Professional Journalists this year added “always attribute” to a long-time admonition to “never plagiarize.”
National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel began a segment on Zakaria by pointing out that The Washington Post was the fifth news organization to say “that work it has published by Zakaria appears to have attribution problems.”
NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik said the anonymous bloggers argue that “he’s done so much lifting unattributed characterizations of other people’s reporting that it amounts to plagiarism.”
Folkenflik went on to say that other critics insist Zakaria “is getting away with stuff that others wouldn’t be allowed to do who are more junior, who don’t have the brand-name recognition that he does…”
Dylan Byers of Politico.Com also outlined the campaign waged by the anonymous “plagiarism detectives,” and reported that Zakaria, in an email to Politico, argued “that he simply cited the same facts as others, which did not constitute plagiarism.”
Others say it’s a troubling pattern.
Writer Lloyd Grove wondered if Zakaria can survive the firestorm.
CNN, however, said it stands by Zakaria.
Ethics AdviceLine for Journalists 