What Do Journalists Owe Their Audience?

In class, we discussed the need for journalists to commit to truth and verification so that they can avoid reporting something like this:

Image retrieved from http://allaboutroswell.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/chicken_little-sky-is-falling.jpg

To ensure accuracy in reporting, I would recommend three steps:

1. Rely on your own reporting. It is more important to have an accurate story than to be the first to report it. For journalists, it is crucial to get to the site of an incident, ask questions and record the answers that they discover. Piggybacking off of other reporters' stories will only lead to trouble.

2. Double-check your facts. All journalists make mistakes, but it is so much better to catch them before a story is released, rather than cleaning up the aftermath. Consider when NPR broke the news that congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot and killed in 2011. It made for a good story. The only problem? Giffords did not actually die. Although the news team quickly fixed the error, the false report spread like wildfire via social media. NPR did not double check their sources and they suffered for it.

A more recent example is that of the Navy Yard massacre last month. Some of the left-wing press were so excited to advance their anti-gun agenda, they did not check their facts as carefully as they should have. They reported that the attacker used an AR-15 assault rifle, the same one used in several other recent mass shootings. Unfortunately, this information was untrue. You can see Bill O'Reilly berate these reporters in this clip. 

3. Make sure that you tell the whole story. It is the job of a journalist to look at what they are writing about from all angles. Chicago TV newscaster Carol Marin taught, "When you sit down this Thanksgiving with your family and you have one of the classic family arguments-whether it's about politics or race or religion or sex-you remember that what you are seeing of that family dispute is seen from the position of your chair and your side of the table. And it will warp your view, because in those instances you are arguing your position...A journalist is someone who steps away from the table and tries to see it all." (Kovach & Rosenstiel, Elements of Journalism, p. 110)

Mark Twain said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." Reporters need to be responsible. They should never allow a lie to outrun the truth.

* For this week's extra credit, I commented on McCall Mishler's blog from class!