Archive for the ‘Accuracy’ Category

Here’s a column I wrote for the Aug. 1 Birmingham News.

Viewpoint: There are Real Perils in non-stop news

By CARL CARTER

The principle that “more isn’t always better” is well-known and preached by every doctor dispensing medicine, every mother fighting with her teenage daughter about make-up and everybody who’s ever nursed a hangover.

But we still can’t seem to grasp that reality when it comes to news. We check our iPhones and BlackBerries constantly during the day for the latest tidbit. Fox and CNN keep up a constant stream, trying desperately to keep the news fresh hour after hour. On most days, it doesn’t matter much. We consume a lot of trivia and pick up some “facts” that get reversed by dinnertime, but there’s little harm done. But when something goes wrong, as it did with the recent Shirley Sherrod fiasco, it can get ugly very quickly.

For those who’ve been in a cave, the drama started when conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a video at 11:18 a.m. on Tuesday, July 18, showing Sherrod describing her supposed discrimination against a white Georgia farmer who risked losing his home. Several conservative outlets immediately picked up the story, and soon, mainstream media were reporting it. Before 8 p.m. the same day, Sherrod had resigned under pressure.

Naturally, pundits and politicians are using this as the basis for a “national conversation about race,” and that may well be in order. But it’s also a good opportunity for a national conversation about how we consume news.

Today’s nonstop news cycle has stripped us of the safeguards that traditionally have filtered out the trivia and brought us dependable news about what really mattered.

The turning point came in 1980, when Ted Turner founded CNN. The next big change came 15 years later with the introduction of the first browser, making possible the World Wide Web. While broadband was still a luxury, dial-up Internet service became ubiquitous in short order, and before long, it was impossible to escape the minute-by-minute flow of news.

Before the nonstop spigots opened up, the day’s news was driven largely by newspapers and TV stations. Reporters covered meetings, trials and other events. Others worked the phones, interviewing sources for features or backgrounders. When a major story broke, there would typically be several hours before a story had to be finalized for the next issue or the next newscast. An experienced editor would ask hard questions. He or she would point out angles that needed to be checked, and facts that needed to be independently confirmed. Editors and reporters would huddle and debate these and other questions:

+ Is this credible?

+ Does the source have an ax to grind?

+ Is there another legitimate side to the story?

+ Is it true?

+ Is it significant?

When the Sherrod story broke, there was no time for such questions. Even though everybody knew the video came from a source with a partisan history and a spotty record for accuracy, some media accepted it at face value, not realizing the tape had been heavily edited to convey precisely the opposite of what Sherrod was saying.

To its credit, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution quickly checked out the story with the wife of the farmer Sherrod had supposedly wronged, and they put a story on the Web early in the day saying Sherrod had, in fact, kept the family out of bankruptcy. Other media? Not so much.

By the end of the day, Sherrod had been drummed out of her USDA job.

The reality is that, for all the ebb and flow of noise during the day, practically every important news story can be told in a few paragraphs. Anybody who wants to stay informed can do so with a

daily read of his or her local newspaper, supplemented by one mainstream national source, such as The New York Times or The Washington Post.

For years, we were protected by the filters of the media. It sometimes felt like deprivation or censorship, and sometimes, it was, but it was far more efficient. Now, those filters are gone, and they won’t be reinstalled. The lessons of the Sherrod story may slow the media down a bit, but, ultimately, it’s up to us, as news consumers, to decide how to most efficiently stay informed.

Carl Carter is president of NewMediaRules Communications, based in Birmingham, and is a former Birmingham News reporter. He writes about media issues at www.overcoffeemedia.com.

Politico’s Roger Simon, in a nice article about Journolist, pulls out a priceless nugget from Stanley Walker, a famous editor from the ’20s and ’30s:

“What makes a good newspaperman? The answer is easy. He knows everything. He is aware not only of what goes on in the world today, but his brain is a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

“He hates lies and meanness and sham, but keeps his temper. He is loyal to his paper and to what he looks upon as his profession; whether it is a profession or merely a craft, he resents attempts to debase it.

“When he dies, a lot of people are sorry, and some of them remember him for several days.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40308_Page2.html#ixzz0vAQWuO75

Why am I so obsessed with the challenge of understanding the future of communications? I mean, besides the fact that I’m a public relations professional who specializes in media relations? It’s because our democracy depends upon a healthy, vibrant, independent press to function properly. We can’t all attend the meetings, search through the files and spend hundreds of hours understanding the issues on which we have to vote. So we rely on reporters to do the heavy lifting for us. And I’m always the first cheerleader for those professionals.

But reporters aren’t perfect, and too many have fallen into the habit of “balancing” their stories by simply quoting the usual suspects on the different sides of the issue, without taking any responsibility for assessing the accuracy of what those sources say. The result only looks balanced. But in truth, that kind of story does nothing but parrot vested interests who aren’t known for their … uh … factual precision. We’ve fallen into this notion that objectivity is simply a matter of quoting both sides. But the truth is, objectivity is the willingness to explain the facts themselves, not just repeat the spin. Trudy Lieberman wrote an excellent piece for Columbia Journalism Review on how the “clashing quotes” approach to journalism failed us on the health reform debate.

It’s both encouraging and disturbing that we’re now seeing a surge in “fact checking” sites, where journalists do just that. They don’t quote sources except to examine the accuracy of what they say. They actually do things like read the health reform bill and see what it says. That’s the encouraging part.

So what’s disturbing about it? The fact that “fact checking” has become a separate discipline, and that it’s occurring on specialized sites rather than in the newspapers, magazines and TV stories. And if you read these sites, you’ll be astounded to discover just how much you “know” that simply isn’t true. The biggest probably is Annenberg Center’s www.factcheck.org, which did a particularly good job debunking the myths being spread by both sides of the health care debate. My personal favorite for political stuff is www.politifact.com, run by the St. Petersburg Times. The St. Pete Times is a great paper, but why do they feel they need a separate site to actually check facts?

At least they’re there. Who knows? Maybe the practice of actually checking facts will bleed over into the stories themselves.

Count ‘em. Seven. In The New York Times, of all places.

So what do we conclude? That we can’t trust the mainstream media to get it right? Just the opposite, I’d say. In his explanation of the fiasco, Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt pulls no punches in describing the mess:

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

There are troubling questions. What was a reporter with a history of errors doing at the Times anyway? Well, covering television. How much harm could she do there?

Newspapers make mistakes. The frequency and severity of those mistakes varies widely. In my experience (a decade as a writer and editor for a daily and 25 years or so as a public relations professional), the worst are “mom and pop” weeklies, where the lines between advertising and news get far too blurred for my taste. As a rule, reporters for the national media are far more careful, and a “fact checker” often calls later to make sure the reporter got it right.

The Times probably has the best system in the world for making sure stories are correct. But in the crush of a deadline, they didn’t use it. They waved the story through without the scrutiny their political and business stories usually receive. I’ve had the experience of reporting on tight deadlines in crisis mode, and we made a lot of mistakes too.

It happens. That’s one reason I’m not a fan of 24-hour cable news, especially when a big story is breaking. They have to work too fast. Stories don’t get evaluated and tested. They don’t have a chance to separate rumor from fact. And you can watch CNN all day without knowing any more than you could reading the AP wrapup at the end of the day.

I trust them not because they made mistakes, but because they faced up to them. They not only ran a very embarrassing correction, but they explained in painful detail what went wrong. They “manned up” (pardon the sexism), as it were.

It’s been a while since I commented on the problems with accuracy and perspective resulting from trying to funnel “breaking news” to the audience as soon as it happens. It’s been a problem for the news channels, especially Fox and CNN, for years. We stay glued to the set during a major news event and hear all the trivia, but at the end of the day, we have no idea what really mattered.

Journalists tend to follow each other around, because none wants an editor asking why he missed a story someone else had. (It never occurs to them that the only way to get a story that’s uniquely theirs is to go their own way, but that’s another issue.)

And when they can read each other’s tweets and pass them on without any fact checking, it gets even worse. This article by Marc Gunther gives a great example. Why Twitter Can Be Bad for Journalism.

As I mentioned last week, I had trouble getting my arms around the New York Times story on John McCain’s relationship (or whatever it was) with an attractive female lobbyist. Having worked with the Times numerous times over the years, I have to believe that they know more than they wrote. They always do. That’s how they work; only the most solid stuff is “fit to print” in their world.

To be candid, this was not the Times‘ finest moment. The implication of a sexual relationship was nothing more than hearsay based on a source with an ax to grind and others who were anonymous. The story did not reflect the Times standards I’ve seen over the years.

Anybody who has read past posts knows that I regard the Times as the gold standard of journalism, but this time it feels a bit copperish.

When all the major media networks projected Barack Obama as the winner of the South Carolina races within seconds after the polls closed, I was all prepared to write a “did they learn nothing from New Hampshire?” diatribe, but the exit polls had served them well: Obama won, and won big.

Still, it’s still not clear to me whether they’ve learned their lesson. Most SC polls had Obama ahead, but only by 9 to 15 points. Yet, he won the primary by a whopping 28 percentage points. In other words, the South Carolina polls were farther off target than the ones in New Hampshire. But because they didn’t predict the wrong winner (only the margin), there hasn’t been a peep about it. But for the record, the pollsters missed it again. If they had been wrong in the other direction, they’d be wiping more egg off their chins.

That said, there’s just something fundamentally wrong with projecting a winner before the first actual vote is counted. Aside from bragging rights of being the first to make the projection, it seems to me that it’s bad for ratings. Once I know the winner, I’m tempted to switch off and watch something more stimulating, like maybe House or a M*A*S*H rerun. As long as there’s suspense, I’m glued to the TV, switching between MSNBC and CNN.

Here’s another example of the point I made earlier this week about the loss of the 24-hour news cycle. If you missed it, the crux is that the pressure to get breaking news out in minutes makes it impossible for reporters to check their facts, question alternative sources and gain perspective.

Paradoxically, the constant flow of stuff on the Internet and cable news may actually be leaving us less informed. By the time our best media follow up and give us a meaningful context, it’s old news and nobody’s interested.

Heath Ledger Tragedy Reveals New World of ‘Speed Reporting’

Heath Ledger Tragedy Reveals New World of ‘Speed Reporting’By Editor & Publisher Staff

Published: January 22, 2008 9:30 PM ET

NEW YORK Already the media have found at least two dozen angles to approach the sudden death of actor Heath Ledger in New York City today. The Los Angeles Times entertainment blog, Web Scout, used the occasion to look at the way the news emerged, almost in “real time.”

The Times now reports on its site, pointing to the danger, “that preliminary reports that pills were found scattered around Ledger’s body” were “inaccurate.”

If you watched the story of Heath Ledger’s death explode chaotically across the Internet, with facts, errors, inconsistencies and confusions flying every which way, you may have concluded that in the new digital media’s race to break stories in minutes, accuracy has been left in the dust.

Chief among the media’s switchbacks was the early non-fact that Ledger’s death had taken place at the New York apartment of Mary-Kate Olsen. Celebrity news site TMZ.com and even the New York Times’ City Room blog reported this piece of misinformation before they unreported it.

Importantly, however, neither the New York Times nor TMZ got it wrong. It was the NYPD spokesman who had the story mixed up — the media were simply parroting incorrect information.

When the spokesman later corrected himself, the sites rushed to update the story, but readers were critical of the changes.

“TMZ is in such a rush to break the news,” one commenter wrote, echoing dozens of others, “that they are usually wrong first.”

But here’s the problem: Stories have never arrived to the world fully formed or vetted. Journalists have generally had hours — not minutes or seconds — to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell.

What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.

The Fund for Independence in Journalism has just published a comprehensive review of the Bush Administration’s false statements about Iraqi WMDs and links to Al Qaeda — and the media’s failure to correct them — in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Over the past two and a half years, researchers compiled a database of all public statements on the two topics by George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House Press Secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan.

The study found that Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld made at least 935 false statements in the two years following the 9/11 attacks. The authors conclude that “n exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

To those of us who depend on an independent “fourth estate” to guard against abuses of power (and that’s all of us, whether we know it or not!), this is troubling, to say the least. There are a lot of causes, including:

• Compression of news cycles. We’re seeing the impact of the disappearance of the daily and weekly news cycles. When the news came only once a day, media had hours to check the facts, contact sources, and gain some perspective. Now that the competition will have its story out in 10 minutes, reporters have to simply do a quick rewrite of the press release and move on to the next story.
• Depletion of newsroom sources. Draconian cuts forced by declining circulation have made it more difficult to assign teams of reporters to work for days or weeks on an issue.
• Misplaced priorities. Of course, with resources becoming more scarce every day, one has to wonder what the media could do if they focused less on the dramas of celebrity brats like Britney Spears and put more of that staff time to work on things that matter.

I know it makes me sound like an old fogey, but I’m convinced that if media in the 1970s had covered the news the way they do now, we’d have never heard of Watergate.