Under constant scrutiny by the public, most journalists accept the fact that some days they’re the pigeon and some days they’re the statue.
But for those journalists who approach their jobs every day in a professional and ethical manner, it’s much harder to accept being a statue because of the way some journalists fly by the seat of their pants.
In last month’s column I shared with you a laundry list of complaints the public has about the news media, and why public perception of news media credibility is so low. Most of the reasons cited for that loss of public confidence was due to mistakes in grammar, spelling and fact.
But media credibility also gets corrupted through shallowness and insensitivity, and through ineptness and stupidity. Journalists who recognize this kind of destruction of credibility are left to wonder, into how many pieces can their so-called peers cut the credibility of a single profession?
News-Sentinel Sports Columnist Reggie Hayes encountered one such instance, and wrote about it in a column March 30. It dealt with some of the questions journalists (sic) were asking members of the Purdue women’s basketball team prior to the Final Four national championship games. In case you missed his column, here’s an except from it in which Reggie described the give-and-take between a reporter and Purdue star Stephanie White-McCarty:
- “Stephanie, North Carolina’s Chantel Wright told us you tried to teach her a dance when you were at a summer camp together. Is that right?”
- “Stephanie, do you remember what dance that was?”
- “Stephanie, could you demonstrate the dance?”
Reggie reported that White-McCarty’s answer was “I can’t remember. It slipped my mind.”
Reggie appropriately followed with a comment of his own: “Unlike her (McCarty-White’s) inquisitors, she has one. A mind, that is.”
The last question asked of Indiana University Coach Bob Knight at the post-game press conference following I.U.’s loss to Temple was whether he (Knight) had thought much lately about his basketball legacy. The question had nothing to do with the game and seemed to backhandedly imply that Knight “was finished” as a coach. Knight was finished, but only with the press conference. He abruptly got up and left after a terse response that the only thing he was thinking about was where he was going fishing.
Perhaps the answer to stopping stupid questions is for the news media to begin publicly identifying the reporters who are asking them.
Sports competitions aren’t the only news events that bring out the inept side of some members of the news media.
For shallowness and insensitivity, its difficult to find better examples than those in which relatives of victims of tragedies have a microphone shoved in their face, only to be asked the same trite disaster question: “How did it make you feel when you found out your (insert mother, father, daughter or son, etc.) had been killed?” Or, “How did it make you feel when you found out your home had been ripped to shreds by the (insert tornado, hurricane, earthquake, fire, etc.)?”
The obvious intent is to elicit an emotional, tearful response as a camera zooms in for a close-up of the person’s face. The repetitive wording of these kinds of interviews makes you wonder if these reporters are really expecting these people to say they feel something other than sorrow?
Also in the category of triteness fall the overzealous reporters who suggest they are about to reveal “a parent’s worst nightmare.” An average viewer might think someone’s child had died, but some reporters brush the dust off that phrase all too often to report things as trivial as the fact that stores were sold out of a popular toy at Christmas-time.
Media self-destruction of another kind was the subject of an online discussion among several journalist-members of the Organization of News Ombudsmen last week.
The topic concerned the propriety of newspapers publishing fake stories on April Fool’s Day. One member of the discussion group suggested that fake newspaper stories on April Fools Day were no more harmful or misleading than daily publication of comic strips depicting characters that never seem to age.
The fact is, there is still some truth to the axiom that you can fool some of the people some of the time. And when you fool them using news space designed for reporting facts, not fiction, you risk trading a month’s worth of credibility with one reader for a moment of laughter with another.
There are already too many so-called journalists making fools of themselves and the profession on more days than just on the first of April. Journalists would do well to leaving those kind of laughs to those ageless comic strip and cartoon characters.
