The press is forever telling major institutions–city hall, big business, the church–to clean up their acts. What about the press’s own act? Last month Medill’s journalism school issued a report that concluded the level of self-criticism in the nation’s newsrooms is too low, though it didn’t say what the right level is.
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The Medill report strains to support the proposition that what’s going on in American newsrooms needs to change. It says at the outset that it’s concerned with “inaccurate, misleading or fabricated” newspaper content. But when it asked the journalists about their own experience with tainted journalism in the previous year the list of possible scenarios led off with: “Reader accused you of ‘bias.’” Seventy-two percent of journalists said that had happened to them. I’m only surprised the number wasn’t higher. Next was: “Suspected source misled you,” and 39 percent of the journalists said they’d been suspicious. Again, welcome to journalism. These can be moments of anguish for reporters, but they’re not necessarily evidence of turpitude.
Let’s look at some other numbers. When the journalists were asked why public confidence in newspapers has declined, 71 percent of them listed “external factors,” such as national media scandals, and only 47 percent listed problems at their own papers or with newspapers generally. The Medill report interprets this disparity as evidence that journalists are in denial, but I don’t see why. Public confidence is declining for lots of reasons–some external, some internal, and some having to do with changes in the nature of the public (which 44 percent of journalists polled mentioned). External factors are the most obvious and the most universal–Jayson Blair is a cross every journalist bears, even ones whose own newsrooms are beyond reproach. The report offers no evidence that the journalists who cited external factors or audience factors were closing their eyes to what went on around them in their own shops.
I asked Chicago’s ethics Savonarola what he thought. Tribune reporter Casey Bukro has crusaded for decades to get journalists to hold each other accountable. All that his efforts have accomplished is a line at the end of the code of ethics of the national Society of Professional Journalists declaring that “journalists should. . . expose unethical practices of journalists and the news media.”
Most papers don’t have ombudsmen, he replied, but where there is one–a person staffers can talk over their suspicions with so they don’t feel they’re tattling to the boss–maybe 50 percent.
