In the first few days after the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia, I came to the conclusion — based on passing knowledge of the subject matter, early news reports and instinct — that more than one thing had to go wrong for such a catastrophe to occur. It had to be a system failure, because even the potential for something that bad should have been caught.
Though the jury — in this case, the investigating panel — is still out on that one, I think public hearings and subsequent news reports have indicated this to be so. A breakaway piece of external fuel tank foam that compromised the spacecraft may be the most obvious culprit in the disaster, but other enabling factors in the shuttle’s enormous support structure of human beings and hardware helped to create what became a doomsday scenario.
Sadly, this is the image that I have attached to the still-unfolding saga at The New York Times.
This great and historic newspaper and news organization has been rocked to its roots by a scandal involving a wayward reporter named Jayson Blair and a system that didn’t detect or effectively deter his misdeeds until great damage had been done.
As laboriously chronicled in last Sunday’s New York Times, those journalistic misdeeds included engaging in plagiarism, fiction and serial inaccuracy. (You can read the whole report at www.nytimes.com.)
The debris field in this headline-grabbing scandal is wide and long, and enfolds the pages, staff and readers of The Courier-Journal.
The New York Times News Service is one of the supplemental wire services to which we subscribe in order to provide a fuller and richer daily report to our readers. The Times’ coverage of international news and the arts is among the best in the world. Its national reporting is insightful, in-depth and awardwinning. Its columnists, whose work appears in the Forum section, provide lively and reasoned opinions for us to consider.
A search of our library’s archives shows we printed six news stories by Blair from 1999 through March 2003. Some of you undoubtedly read them.
According to the Times’ investigation into Blair’s work, three of those stories contained plagiarism, factual errors and/or false reporting; the other three were not cited in the Times’ report.
One of Blair’s stories we published was about the family of Army Pvt. Jessica Lynch, the celebrated POW in the Iraqi war (March 28). Two stories were about the suspects in the Washington-area sniper shootings (Nov. 11 and Dec. 22, 2002).
That intentional, professional sins are committed in journalism is not surprising. Appalling, maybe, but not surprising.
Just as there are bad or unethical doctors, teachers, lawyers, ship’s captains and fastfood order takers, there are bad or unethical journalists.
They exist, but they don’t define the work of all journalists.
Conscientious practitioners in the news media understand that credibility is the starting and stopping point of what we do. Such practitioners also understand that anecdotal and professionally gathered information reveals that sizable numbers of the public see us as credibility-challenged.
This is why so many news organizations have declared statements of ethical principles or guidelines for how we are supposed to do what we do. Our company is one of them. We have in writing what our standard practices of journalism are supposed to be. Indeed, The Courier-Journnal was the first newspaper in America to adopt a conflicts of interest policy; it took effect in 1972 and became a model for the industry.
Of course, these only work if we practice what we preach.
And that goes back to the system failure I mentioned earlier.
Like other news outlets, the Times has a set of ethical principles by which its employees are expected to conduct themselves. In one such document, ”Guidelines on Our Integrity,” every one of Blair’s professional transgressions is mentioned.
From those guidelines:
* ”Readers should be able to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said. . . .”
* ”When we use facts gathered by any other organization, we attribute them. This policy applies to material from newspapers, magazines, books and broadcasts, as well as news agencies like The Associated Press. . . .”
* ”The use of unidentified sources is reserved for situations in which the newspaper could not otherwise print information it considers newsworthy and reliable. When possible, reporter and editor should discuss any promise of anonymity before it is made, or before the reporting begins on a story that may result in such a commitment. . . .”
The Times’ own investigation shows that the newspaper didn’t follow or monitor adherence to its own guidelines, and that attempts to raise alarms about the reporter either didn’t resound or were addressed, inadequately, in the short run.
Why? Theories — complex, ethereal, premature — abound.
The bottom line is: The breakaway reporter didn’t function in a vacuum. It was system failure.
So why is this such news, and why does it, or should it, matter to so many people?
”The reason the Times gathers such attention is because they’re seen as the standard bearers of our industry — they do it the right way, and something like this won’t happen to them,” said Gary Hill, ethics committee chair for the Society of Professional Journalists.
”I can empathize to a point. If I have a reporter who is so deceptive and willing to lie, it does present some problems. But this seems so egregious it should be caught.”
I asked Hill about collateral damage.
”The larger damage is people saying, ‘You journalists just make things up.’ A certain segment of the population has believed that all along. But now it’s true. It’s happened dozens of times in an organization with a major news distribution service,” Hill said.
This matters because we deliver the news to you. And if you don’t believe us, we all have a big problem.
The Times is taking steps to continue to assess and correct the damage to itself, its credibility and its relationship with readers.
The rest of the news world would be wise not to be smug, and do the same.
In last week’s column, I shared the Citizens Journalism Bill of Rights with you, a list of what you should expect from journalism and journalists.
This week, I invite you to take a look at our responsibilities and what we expect of ourselves.
Several years ago, Gannett, the parent company of this newspaper, issued ”Guidelines on Ethical Newsgathering for Newsrooms.” Each year, every employee in our newsroom reads those guidelines and signs a document acknowledging such.
This set of standards is now posted for you on our www.courier-journal.com Web site; click on Newsgathering Guidelines under the Customer Service heading found in the left margin of the site.
If you don’t have a computer and would like a copy of the guidelines, contact me and I’ll mail them to you.
One last thing: In re-reading last week’s column, I noticed that I mischaracterized how Blair parted with The New York Times. He resigned.
