By Bob Giles
Nieman Foundation
I begin with a word of thanks for enabling the Nieman Foundation to be the host of your meeting this week. I am impressed with the serious purpose you bring to your discussions. Listening to your sessions and meeting you has been a valuable learning experience for me.
In sharing some thoughts this morning on fairness, a good starting point is to acknowledge that newspapers that employ ombudsmen are making a clear statement of an intent to be fair. And fairness is one of the many elements that helps build public trust in the newspaper.
I had the privilege of meeting with you in your annual conference in Montreal in May 2000.
At that time I was working for the Freedom Forum on a project called Free Press/Fair Press. It was a moment in which newspapers were struggling to address fragile public support of their journalism.
The American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Project for Excellence in Journalism were engaged in a growing national effort to improve public perceptions of press credibility.
The Freedom Forum’s particular focus on fairness, as part of the larger examination of credibility, was built on the idea that if the press is seen as fair it can also be seen as credible by its audiences.
Our experience in examining fairness recognized that this was a global concern, not just one for U.S. newspapers.
International media forums in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia during 1998, enabled journalists, media executives and government leaders to look at press performance in their regions of the world through the lens of fairness.
These discussions reinforced our understanding of differences in the concepts of a free press between the U.S. and many of the world’s democracies.
In countries where there is a partisan press or where media ownership strongly influences content, for example, fairness was seen in a different context.
The question seemed not to be whether individual news organizations are fair, but whether there is a range of voices and points of view that, taken together, add up to a fair press.
A few months after your Montreal meeting, I was invited to come to Harvard and I soon found myself examining fairness in a different way.
The Taylor Family that owned The Boston Globe over five generations had invited the Nieman Foundation to administer an annual award that would recognize exemplary examples of fairness in newspapers.
My predecessor, Bill Kovach, had begun conversations with representatives of the Taylor family and editors of the Globe about organizing the competition.
Bill passed the Taylor Award file on to me and I attended a series of planning meetings over the next several months, in which our little group found itself exploring the meaning of fairness and trying answer the question: Should we/could we define fairness as the basis of judging the entries in the award competition?
The more we talked the more it came clear that this is a question for which there were no easy answers.
The idea of fairness in journalism is complex and diverse; not easily defined for a journalism competition, or even in the everyday assessment of stories for tomorrow’s newspaper.
We began the competition in 2002 with no specific definition of fairness in mind. It was our expectation that the newspaper entries, and the nomination letters accompanying them, would provide definitions as they described how the project was framed, reported and presented to readers in the context of fairness.
After six years, the Taylor awards in fairness are well established. We have in hand a range of examples that help expand our understanding of fairness.
This year, as we honored three newspapers, we recognized, again, how the stories demonstrated the complexity of fairness in journalism.
The Lancaster New Era received the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers and the $10,000 honorarium for its coverage of the Amish schools shootings in that rural Pennsylvania community.
The newspaper confronted the deeply held spirit of Amish communal life that no individual should stand out from the group.
This posed a fundamental issue of fairness for the New Era newsroom: How could the paper balance the community’s expectation of immunity—that is, no one would be quoted by name—with its own need to put sources on the record as a matter of journalistic credibility?
The solution, editor Ernest Schreiber explained, was to gather “so much information from so many sources that we could write confidently and compellingly without revealing the identities of those who wished anonymity.”
The result was a three-day series called “Lost Angels: The untold stories of the Amish School shootings,” which shed light on worlds usually hidden from view in remarkably fair and just ways.
One of the finalists was The New York Times and reporter Tim Golden for his stories on Guantanamo.
In this case, Golden addressed difficult questions about the Bush administration’s terrorist-detention system, hidden under layers of government secrecy, and produced new answers by getting key players to speak on the record about how the system was created and how it has operated.
His stories demonstrated that the obstacles to fully informing the public constructed by military or government rationale, even during time of war, should be no substitute for either truth or fairness.
Transparency was the critical element of fairness in the third award this year: Reporter John Mangels’ series of stories in The Plain Dealer of Cleveland on a leading scientist in the field of plagues who could not explain the disappearance of 30 vials of plague bacteria from his laboratory and eventually spent two years in prison.
Mangels’ stories avoided the temptation to portray the scientist as a heroic figure and to characterize the government’s role, in the name of homeland security, as one that resulted in an injustice.
Mangels achieved transparency, in part, by assembling a long list of footnotes that identified documents and sources for the major points in the series, which he posted online.
A snapshot of the complexity of fairness can be seen in these three examples: respecting cultural and religious traditions to the extent of publishing anonymous quotes; unraveling a failed terrorist-detention program by getting participants to speak on the record, and extensively footnoting sources and documents to help readers understand the reporter’s trail.
Following the award ceremony, reporters and editors from the papers being honored talk with Nieman Fellows. Year after year, the Fellows find these conversations particularly enriching as they reveal qualities distinctive to fair stories grounded in the basic elements of journalism
One of the lessons these discussions yield over time is that ordinary citizens had experiences with fairness in many of the stories.
The manner in which newspapers reported on the conflicts and tragedies confronting people thrust unexpectedly into the news was often the quality that distinguished the stories as outstanding examples of fairness.
Looking back at six years of entries we find other elements of fairness that stand out.
Typically, the reporters gave extensive attention to accuracy and precise detail.
They reflected the entire community fully and fairly, and their stores were attuned to cultural differences and nuances.
Their reporting revealed an authoritative understanding of the complicated events they were explaining, which resulted in stories that portrayed an accurate context.
The reporters seemed to come at the assignment with no preconceived story line.
They drew on sources that were in a position to know something about the events being reported on.
They used their narrative skills to craft stories that achieved what can be considered an “objective truth.”
In considering fairness as a virtue, is it, in today’s world of journalism, more difficult to attain?
The answer, it seems, is not more difficult, but perhaps more complex.
Thinking back to the concern about credibility that was a consuming challenge in your meeting in Montreal, and fast-forwarding to today, through the damage of Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg, Jack Kelly, Dan Rather, the contagion of dismissals over plagiarism and other newsroom scandals, the problems are still with us.
The Internet has contributed to making the challenge of being fair more complex, if not more difficult.
The myriad of online outlets has changed our relationship with the public and our relationship with one another across newsrooms and throughout the world of journalism.
Among other things, it has brought transparency to the work of ombudsmen. The periodic internal memos that once were circulated quietly to the newsroom family are now part of the public record of your newspapers’ performance. Sometimes they are posted on the newspaper’s Web site. Sometimes they are leaked.
Richard Chacon spoke yesterday of posting his notes to the Globe staff on his personal blog.
Some of these memos find a place on Romenesko. And if the offending reporter or editor wants to reply to the criticism these responses also are likely to get the public exposure the Web offers.
If nothing else, the larger public forum in which these discussions about journalistic performance takes place encourages more judicious language from all parties; which means, perhaps, that an element of fairness has found its way into the internal discourse over standards and values.
It was just a few years ago that there was hesitation in providing writers’ e-mail addresses as a shirt-tail to stories. These addresses are now a routine part of stories. They put reporters in direct contact with readers and create new links for readers to reach into the newsroom.
Some reporters claim to be overwhelmed by the volume of e-mails in response to stories with their bylines. Some are dedicated to answering them, some reporters refuse.
As reporters and editors introduce personal blogs to communicate directly with readers, it complicates the ombudsman’s task of overseeing all that goes to the public under the newspaper’s name.
The power of public exposure to journalistic behavior through the Web has forced news organizations to think anew about defining their ethics and their standards, and presenting them to the public through online postings.
Many of these statements make an effort to define fairness.
The Poynter Institute, for example, states that “We do our best to act justly, to respect people, to respect privacy, to minimize harm, and to keep our promises. We do our best to present different points of view in ways that adherents of various perspectives judge to be accurate.
“These guidelines serve as checks and balances on the perspectives and personal biases that each of us brings to decisions we make…
The Los Angeles Times Ethics Policy addresses the question of fairness this way: “A fair-minded reader of Times news coverage should not be able to discern the private opinions of those who contributed to that coverage, or to infer that the newspaper is promoting any agenda.
“A crucial goal of our news and feature reporting — apart from editorials, columns, criticism and other content that is expressly opinionated — is to be non-ideological. This is a tall order. It requires us to recognize our own biases and stand apart from them.
“It also requires us to examine the ideological environment in which we work, for the biases of our sources, our colleagues and our communities can distort our sense of objectivity.
“In covering controversial issues — strikes, abortion, gun control and the like — we seek out intelligent, articulate views from all perspectives. Reporters should try genuinely to understand all points of view, rather than simply grab quick quotations to create a semblance of balance.
“People who will be shown in an adverse light in an article must be given a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves. This means making a good-faith effort to give the subject of allegations or criticism sufficient time and information to respond substantively.
“Whenever possible, the reporter should meet face-to-face with the subject in a sincere effort to understand his or her best arguments.
“Investigative reporting requires special diligence with respect to fairness. Those involved in such stories should bear in mind that they are more credible when they provide a rich, nuanced account of the topic. Our coverage should avoid simplistic portrayals.”
Looking ahead, the ability of newspapers to be fair will come under stress increasingly as a consequence of the downsizing of news staffs.
As Barney Calame wrote in his farewell column as the Times Public Editor, “Generating the revenue to pay for the news staff needed to maintain The Times’s high quality is the most serious challenge. “With advertising revenue from the print paper weakening in recent years, the hope was that growing revenue from advertising on the Web site would pick up the slack.
“Unfortunately, as The Times reported April 20, the paper has ‘decided to reduce its 2007 guidance for Internet revenue growth, suggesting that the transition from a print advertising model may be a long time coming.’”
What his warning suggests to me is that as news staffs shrink, the time and resources devoted to news coverage will diminish, and with it the ability of reporters and editors to reflect on and effectively work out the many elements of fairness in news coverage.
