Time to rethink an old “rule” of ethics
By Lawrence Timbs
Ask professional journalists or editors about their stance on prepublication review by a source, and you’re likely to get that familiar flinch or bristle that you’re even broaching that question.
They’re prone to note that as professionals, they’ve been well trained in collecting, writing and packaging information. Accuracy, many will emphatically insist, is journalism’s holy grail.
Furthermore, in a digital environment, where there’s a never-ending rush to break or post stories online, who’s got the time or patience to run a story by a source for review and fact checking? And besides, once a story goes online, readers have plenty of opportunities to point out errors.
Never mind that a source unknowingly or unintentionally got a fact wrong or may have violated someone’s privacy, or, worse, libeled someone and thus has potentially put the news outlet and others in legal jeopardy.
Prepublication review in an online news environment?
Nah! Ain’t gonna happen.
But maybe it should—at least in some instances.
Will the sky really fall if a source politely asks to review a story before it’s posted or published, and the news outlet consents? Will the First Amendment champions of freedom and independence go into convulsions?
After all, a sizable percentage of Americans, according to a 2009 report from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, have very little confidence in the accuracy and fairness of information from the news media.
And journalists, if they truly honor their own codes of ethics, should not be above or beyond the notion of prepublication review.
Yet, still, even in today’s online news environment, where getting the story out first so that it can then be instantly picked up (with all its potential errors), prepublication review seems anathema.
Why such a railing, in newsrooms, against this sort of commitment to accuracy and responsibility to readers?
Perhaps it stems from professional arrogance. It’s as if journalists and their sources—as well as their readers—are at odds with one another. Little wonder there’s all that recoiling at the idea of prepublication review.
My own experience with prepublication review wasn’t bad. In retrospect, while it may have smarted just a tad, I learned something very valuable and became a better journalist for it.
It occurred in 1979 or 1980. Can’t remember the exact year but one of those, I believe.
I was general manager/editor of a twice-a-week 8K-circulation community newspaper in rural south-central Illinois.
I had heard about a physician in the local community who faithfully and rigorously jogged every day for exercise. He was pretty well known and respected, as I recall, and seemed to be in excellent health. He regularly ran marathons (26+ miles).
What really got my attention as a journalist/editor was when this same physician suddenly had a massive heart attack. In those days, as I recall, it was believed that someone who ran marathons was immune to having a heart attack.
So, again, my journalistic antenna went up when this well-known paragon of fitness physician had to be transported by ambulance to St. Louis for life saving heart surgery.
He survived the surgery and returned a few weeks later to his practice in the town where we circulated our newspaper.
I called him and asked if he would consent to being interviewed about what he had been through, and explained to him that my story angle would be that he had proven the exception to the commonly held belief that you-can’t-have-a-heart-attack-if-you-run-a-marathon.
He agreed to talking with me for the record.
After I had written my story and a day or so before we went to press, he called me and asked politely if he could review the story before it was published.
Trying to contain my frustration, I politely explained that we had a firm policy at the paper against pre-publication review and that he had nothing to worry about. I assured him that I would be accurate and ethical and that the story would generally be an upbeat piece about how he had survived a heart attack.
But he still insisted on reviewing my story before it was published.
Again, I resisted, but again he pressed me for giving him the chance to look over what I had written.
“You know, Larry, I agreed to talk to you when you contacted me. Seems like you could extend this one courtesy to me,” he said. “If not, I won’t ever have anything to do with your newspaper again.”
I told him I’d consider his request.
You know what?
After a sleepless night, I ended up the next morning inviting him to come to my office to read the story before I submitted it for publication.
The guy came. I handed him the story. He retreated to my office, spent about 15 minutes in there with the story and exited with a smile and a handshake. He thanked me for doing a very good job.
I recall that he requested only one minor word change of what I had written.
In retrospect, yes, I had violated our paper’s stringent prohibition against pre-publication review.
But I had also gained.
I had cultivated and maintained a contact with an excellent source of information in our community—one that the newspaper would rely upon many times in the future, as it turned out.
Bottom line: In a small community, you as an editor or journalist should try never to burn a bridge or alienate a valuable source.
Even if it means you have to adjust your ethics.
Okay, all this happened to me eons ago—way before the Web and before journalists had to scramble to deal with not only posting printed stories but also creating videos and podcasts of those same stories. My story was a simple human interest feature about a local doctor who had miraculously survived a massive heart attack, not about a potentially libelous topic or deep dark scandal.
What I wrote was not risky or legally troublesome, and still I relented to prepublication review. And things turned out pretty well.
If prepublication review can help improve, even just a little, the accuracy and fairness of information in today’s demanding digital news environment, media professionals should not be so quick to dismiss it. After all, the premiums today on truth, accuracy, fairness and responsibility are the same as they were in 1980.
—Lawrence Timbs is an associate professor of mass communication at Winthrop University.
No comments:
Post a Comment