The Vanishing Newspaper [2nd Ed]: Saving Journalism in the Information Age

5. Accuracy in Reporting

82 Accuracy in Reporting In 2003, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was caught creating fabrications for major stories and putting them in the paper. He had been doing it for several months. Observers wondered how he got away with it for so long. Why didn’t his sources blow the whistle? It turns out that not complaining is normal behavior for sources who see the truth they’ve spoken twisted into factual errors in the paper. In a two-year survey of more than five thousand newspaper sources conducted for this chapter, only 10 percent of those who reported finding errors said they contacted the newspaper about it. Inexperienced news sources were about half as likely to complain as government officials and others with an ongoing stake in newspaper accuracy. “I’m too busy,” said one. “Not important enough,” said another. “I didn’t feel it would make a difference,” said a third. “They do not take criticism very well,” offered yet another. Not even Donna Leinwand of USA TODAY complained when errors in the Times led her editors to question her stories on a serial sniper case in the Washington, D.C. area. Blair kept reporting stuff she didn’t have, and the editors would ask her to check it out, but the possibility of outright fabrication didn’t dawn on her immediately. “So I would re-call all my sources, enlist others in the newsroom , and spend what turned out to be wasted time trying to track Chapter 5 Accuracy in Reporting 83 1. Donna Leinwand, e-mail, Oct. 7, 2003. 2. Gregory Stricharchuk, “Computer Records Become Powerful Tool for Investigative Reporters and Editors,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 3, 1988. I was still Philip “Myer” in the database on Sept. 11, 2003. 3. Lori Robertson, “A Choice for Troubled Times,” American Journalism Review 25:6 (August /September 2003), 9. down stuff that Blair had reported. . . . I would reassure my editors, who ultimately do trust me. . . . “That’s not to say I didn’t live in extreme anxiety. I would frequently . . . wake up before the newspaper hit my door to see what Jayson Blair had that I didn’t. Some of my sources did hint to me that the Times stuff was off, but it was hard to tell if they were deliberately trying to mislead to control the investigation. So I’m not sure what I would have complained about while it was ongoing.”1 In 1988, I asked Lyle Schwilling, an Akron public relations executive and old college friend, what to do when The Wall Street Journal misspelled my name. He advised me not to complain. The damage was already done, and a complaint would cause resentment, he reasoned. I was ready to agree until I remembered the electronic database, and I contacted the Journal, asking it to fix the spelling there. I received a friendly reply, but, fifteen years later, the correction had not been made.2 How can sources and newspapers treat facts so casually when truth-telling is the basic value of journalism? The admonition “Seek truth and report it” is found in the first section of the 1996 revision of the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. The code goes on to make the advice explicit: “Test the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error. Deliberate distortion is never permissible.” It might be argued that this goes without saying. Without a commitment to truth-telling, a news medium’s quest for influence would be hopeless. Yet, even in the twenty-first century, professional journalists were having trouble creating procedures and checks to minimize error from both carelessness and malice. If it can happen at The New York Times, it can happen anywhere.3 Newspaper editors in the United States were sufficiently concerned about their credibility to commission several large-scale studies of the issue starting in 1985. The most recent, by Chris Urban in 1999, put public concerns about accuracy as the number-one finding. “There is remarkable unanimity between the public and journalists on the fundamental value of accuracy and `telling it like it is,’ but both groups are skeptical about overall accuracy and would rather see journalists get it right than get it first,” Urban wrote. 84 The Vanishing Newspaper “Both journalists and the public believe that even seemingly small errors feed public skepticism about a newspaper’s credibility. More than a third of the public—35 percent—see spelling or...