A huge journalism scandal has kept reporters and editors buzzing for weeks about what went wrong at The New York Times — but what’s more important is what the public thinks about it.
And that’s where the buzz fades away.
While readers keep the Poughkeepsie Journal newsroom busy with plenty of questions or comments, few have been heard about disgraced Times reporter Jayson Blair, who editors say plagiarized and fabricated his way through dozens of stories. He rose quickly up the reporting ladder at the one of the world’s most respected daily newspapers, despite some editors’ misgivings about his ability.
Our letters to the editor and my mailbox, voice mail and e-mail queue shows that readers are most concerned about news that immediately affects their lives.
Plenty of our readers also read the Times, but their hometown newspaper is the Journal. It’s no surprise, then, that this scandal might not even cause them to blink. In that regard, we’re no different than most other community newspapers.
Or maybe it goes deeper than that.
This newspaper, like others, commonly receives little or no reader reaction when there’s a scandal in the news media industry. And a recent survey could shed some sobering light on this.
About 3,000 people answered questions for the National Credibility Roundtables Project run by The Associated Press Managing Editors.
The AP used newspapers from all over the nation to get responses in the aftermath of the Blair case. The questions dealt with readers’ experiences in contacting newspapers about errors in print and about their perceptions of media responsibility.
It wasn’t a scientific survey, but responses were sadly in line with other studies that show lack of public confidence in the news media and the fairness of coverage.
Those in the survey were asked why readers and sources would fail to alert a newspaper to reporting they knew was inaccurate.
Some said they doubted a newspaper would care or listen. Others said it was too complicated to navigate a newspaper’s correction system. Or that, if an error was so obvious, an editor would notice. Some said they thought some errors were intentional in order to hype stories.
Of the Blair case, newspaper reader Daniel Pelletier of New Hampshire wrote: ”For an institution whose basic tool is the question, it seems to have been woefully neglected in this case.”
While some were supportive of the news media, those surveyed echoed responses in a much larger study done last year that showed many Americans think news organizations won’t acknowledge their errors.
The larger study was done by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
Reader’s mistrust
Newspaper readers are saying they don’t think reporters or editors care about being fair, or accurate.
In most cases, nothing could be farther from the truth.
That’s why there’s been so much buzz on journalism Web sites and across desks and around water coolers in newsrooms.
It goes very much against the grain of what most journalists are trying to do — inform the public as fairly and as accurately as possible.
If readers — key in pointing out lapses — think they don’t matter, we’re all in trouble. News organizations can’t do their jobs well without public feedback. And the public won’t offer that without trust.
The damage of the Jayson Blair case goes far beyond the offices of his humiliated editors.
Journal readers who want to discuss stories and coverage can contact this column, or the section editors. Their names and contact information are listed at the top of the front page of each section, and on our Web site at www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/services/contact.shtml.
