Journalists, ever vigilant to expose wrongdoing, have found themselves in the awkward position recently of having to blow the whistle on themselves.
Columnists, reporters and even a photographer have lost their jobs for distorting the truth. And the publications for which they worked have had to go through the painful and embarrassing process of confessing their employees’ — and sometimes their own — sins.
That fit of candor might suggest that every time a journalist rolls through a stop sign or purloins a No. 2 pencil, you’ll read about it in the morning edition.
Not so — nor should you.
In fact, newspapers are likely to keep to themselves even a serious breach of their rules, short of actual crime, if it doesn’t distort the news.
Contrary to popular myth, journalists are human. There are good ones and bad ones. There are diligent ones and sloppy ones. And sometimes even the best of them make mistakes — including mistakes of judgment.
But not all mistakes affect what you read. That’s what determines whether readers will be burdened with an account of a journalist’s transgressions.
Most often those accounts amount to corrections. In the worst case — as the New York Times experienced this month with Jayson Blair, a reporter who falsified information in dozens of articles — it can result in a 7,000-plus word explanation to readers.
The Los Angeles Times — like the Sentinel, a Tribune Co. newspaper — made a similar, if much shorter, confession during the Iraq war when photographer Brian Walski doctored a photograph. And The Associated Press had to account to its readers last year for Christopher Newton, a reporter who found it easier to invent people than to interview them.
Not too long ago, the Boston Globe had to explain the sudden departure, in quick succession, of a couple of columnists with overactive imaginations.
In each of those cases, readers had been deceived.
Journalists, though, can stray from the straight and narrow in ways that have no effect on the information they deliver to readers — and, for that, suffer consequences ranging from a reprimand to a need to redo a resume.
What they don’t suffer in such cases, as a rule, is the humiliation of a public discussion of their infractions, however serious.
That’s because the relationship between a news organization and the journalists who work for it is a private one — just like the relationship between any other business and its employees. If the guy who pops corn at the Bijou loses his job for overcooking the kernels, that information won’t show up along with The Matrix Reloaded on the marquee.
When a news organization finds that it inadvertently has misrepresented reality, though, readers should expect, at the very least, a correction. And if that misrepresentation is found to have been deliberate, readers are owed nothing less than a full explanation.
Journalists exist to inform — even when the subject is themselves. But they become the news only when, in the process of informing, they bend the truth.
