Excerpts of Resolutions for a Better Post, by Deborah Howell, Washington Post Ombudsman
Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page B06
The Post is one of the best newspapers in the country -- so much better than the hollowed-out newspapers scattered across the landscape. As my term ends, I'd like to again point out ways that The Post can enhance its accessibility, credibility and appeal to readers in this time of economic stress.
[...]
Transparency
· The Post should post its admirable ethics and standards guidelines on washingtonpost.com for all to see. You can find parts of them on the Web site of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The Post challenges the ethics of others; the paper's policies, which are reasonable and elegantly written, should be public and easy to find. I've fought for this internally, but it hasn't happened.
· The Post needs to be better about attributing information and identifying sources. Readers deserve to know where information comes from. Too often the attribution is to anonymous sources, to "sources close to" this official or to "intelligence sources say," or there is no attribution at all.
The Post stylebook says that the paper "is committed to disclosing to its readers the sources of the information in its stories to the maximum possible extent. We want to make our reporting as transparent to the readers as possible so they may know how and where we got our information."
That's a good policy, and it needs to be followed much more closely. The same for this one: "We must strive to tell our readers as much as we can about why our unnamed sources deserve our confidence. Our obligation is to serve readers, not sources. This means avoiding attributions to 'sources' or 'informed sources.' Instead we should try to give the reader something more, such as 'sources familiar with the thinking of defense lawyers in the case'. . . . When sources refuse to be identified, it is often helpful to show readers that we tried to identify them, and explain why we could not."
[...]
· The Post needs to do a more thorough job on corrections. Too often, it's a battle to get one written, and many aren't done; you can often see the evidence of this on the Free for All page on Saturday.
· In a time of staff contraction, The Post must maintain an adequate contingent of copy editors. Maintaining reporting power is important, but if facts aren't checked and there are a rash of misspellings and errors of grammar and math, credibility suffers.
[...]
Diversity
· Make a serious effort to cover political and social conservatives and their issues; the paper tends to shy away from those stories, leaving conservatives feeling excluded and alienated from the paper. I'd like those who have canceled their subscriptions to be readers again. Too many Post staff members think alike; more diversity of opinion should be welcomed.
· The Post's circulation area is incredibly racially diverse, packed with immigrants and people of every conceivable ethnic group. Its news and editorial pages need to reflect that more.
· The Post should pay more attention to female readers, as I said last week. One excellent example this year are the stories by Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan about the plight of women around the world, including Page 1 reports from Pakistan, Germany, Britain, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso, and, on Dec. 13, the heartbreaking story about girls sent to deadening work in India's salt pans while their brothers are educated.
· The op-ed page still needs a healthy dose of gender, racial and ethnic diversity. There are too many older white men and not enough women and people of color. That said, I still love David S. Broder and David Ignatius.
Remedying the Bias Perception. By Deborah Howell
ReplyDeleteSunday, November 16, 2008; Page B06
Excerpts (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/14/AR2008111403057.html):
But some of the conservatives' complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I'll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don't even want to be quoted by name in a memo.
Journalists bristle at the thought of their coverage being viewed as unfair or unbalanced; they believe that their decisions are journalistically reasonable and that their politics do not affect how they cover and display stories.
Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said, "The perception of liberal bias is a problem by itself for the news media. It's not okay to dismiss it. Conservatives who think the press is deliberately trying to help Democrats are wrong. But conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It's inconceivable that that is irrelevant."
[...]
The opinion pages have strong conservative voices; the editorial board includes centrists and conservatives; and there were editorials critical of Obama. Yet opinion was still weighted toward Obama. It's not hard to see why conservatives feel disrespected.
Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.
Rosenstiel said, "There should be more intellectual diversity among journalists. More conservatives in newsrooms will bring about better journalism. We need to be more vigilant and conscious in looking for bias. Our aims are pure, but our execution sometimes is not. Staff members should feel in their bones that unfairness will never be tolerated."
Bob Steele, ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, thinks editors should be doing "ongoing content evaluation of candidates and issues to provide scrutiny on photos, stories, placement of stories and what are the weaknesses and strengths of the candidates." He also recommends "prosecutorial editing" as one way to "minimize the ideological bias and beliefs that all journalists have. It would greatly reduce the news content being skewed by beliefs."
The Post and other news media can work harder on eliminating even the perception of bias while never giving up the willingness to follow stories that will inevitably tick off some readers.
One more factor will kick in soon. After Obama is inaugurated, he will be the authority the news media challenge. It happens in every administration.
h/t: Brent Baker, Newsbusters.org, http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2008/11/16/howell-most-washington-post-journalists-voted-obama-i-did
Howell's farewell column:
ReplyDeleteA Farewell Hope for The Post's Future. By Deborah Howell
Sunday, December 28, 2008; Page B06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/26/AR2008122601144.html
My term as ombudsman ends with this column. My hope for the future is that readers, our lifeblood, will find in The Post, in print and online, journalism they can believe in and that the paper will both engage and enrich the many communities in this region.
Journalism has changed tremendously since my early days covering police and courts in Corpus Christi, Tex. Typewriters and Linotypes are ancient tools, and the Internet sometimes makes ink on paper seem so yesterday. What doesn't change is fact-gathering and analyses that inform readers and help citizens to form a more perfect union.
Journalism is better than it was in my early days, and changes in technology have opened up a new world. My worry is that journalists aren't as connected to readers as they were in the days of my youth, when the city's newspaper was the equivalent of the public square. Then, reporters tended to be folks who often hadn't graduated from, or even attended, college, and they weren't looking to move to bigger papers. They knew the community well, didn't make much money and lived like everyone else, except for chasing fires and crooks.
Now journalists are highly trained, mobile and, especially in Washington, more elite. We make a lot more money, drive better cars and have nicer homes. Some of us think we're just a little more special than some of the folks we want to buy the paper or read us online.
That's a mistake. Readers want us to be smart and tough and for the newspaper to read that way, but they don't want us to think we're better than they are. We need to be worried sick when people drop their subscriptions. We need to think of ways to prevent that.
An unpleasant fact about journalists is that we can be way too defensive. We dish it out a lot better than we take it. It's not that we have thin skin; we often act as though we have no skin and bleed at the slightest touch.
Journalists need to find ways to be more a part of their communities and their interests -- without crossing the line to partisanship -- and to engage with readers in improving the newspaper and its Web site to be sources readers can't do without. If something drives readers nuts, what can we do to help them?
Journalists need to be tough enough to face down a mayor, a police chief or the president of the United States, but we also should be tough enough to respond to honest criticism. The worst part of my job as official internal critic hasn't been dealing with readers, though that has been both daunting and rewarding. Taking those complaints to reporters and editors has been the biggest challenge. I'm grateful to those here who took them seriously. Some readers had complaints that I just couldn't get to; I regret that. Some journalists think I have been unfair to them. If I have, then they know how people who believe The Post has treated them unfairly feel.
Journalists' defensiveness is heightened by the uncertainty that grips our business. The Post has changed in my term. Its news staff is smaller, and so is the space available for stories. Sections are being dropped, and there's a tightening feeling everywhere.
The Internet was on everyone's radar screen in 2005, but its importance wasn't uppermost in everyone's minds. Now it is. The future of journalism is online even as the print newspaper remains by far the biggest revenue-producer. That many readers want to read it in print remains our bread and butter.
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In this time of uncertainty, here's a quote from Bradlee in a recent interview with Bob Woodward: "I cannot envision a world without newspapers. . . . I can envision a world with fewer newspapers. I can envision a world where newspapers are printed differently, distributed differently, but there is going to be a profession of journalism, a band of brothers and sisters working intensely together. Their job is going to be to report what they believe the truth to be. And that won't change."
That's my own fervent wish -- along with wishing that readers appreciate journalists' work. Most cities don't have as good a paper as The Post. A friend who moved away told me that she misses The Post more than anything else. And she's a conservative Republican.
The Washington Post detects media bias. . .in Israel, by Paul Mirengoff
ReplyDeletehttp://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/01/022524.php
PowerLine Blog, January 11, 2009 at 3:42 PM
The Washington Post (http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/detail.jsp?key=336196&rc=to&p=1&all=1) is distressed that Israelis approve of the way the war in Gaza is going. Its correspondent Griff Witte writes:
After 15 days of war that have left more than 800 Palestinians dead -- as many as half of them civilians, medical officials say -- Israelis are sure of two things: They are the victims, and they are also the victors. . . .
In newspapers and on television, commentators approvingly note that the Israeli military has sown devastation in Gaza without a high toll in Israeli lives. If Palestinians are dying, they say, it is Hamas's fault.
Witte cites no examples of commentators who write or speak approvingly of "devastation in Gaza." Most likely, Witte is conflating such approval with approval of the devastation of Hamas in Gaza, perhaps due to sympathy with Hamas, animus towards Israel, or both.
In any event, Witte finds that the Israeli media is at least in part to blame for Israel's allegedly callous view of events in Gaza. He states that "images from Gaza are relatively scarce, while the plight of Israelis injured or killed during the war is covered around the clock."
Notice that Witte is unable to claim that images from Gaza are actually scarce, only that they are "relatively scarce." This probably means that they don't dominate the coverage as they do in the rest of the world, including the pages of the Washington Post. But then the rest of the world isn't at war with Hamas, nor has it experienced a steady stream of rockets attacks from Gaza over the past few years.
Witte seems offended that "each death [of an Israeli] has received blanket media coverage, complete with family interviews and anguished funeral scenes." He must think it improper for Israelis to grieve the deaths of their citizens or for the media to "pander" to lack of sophistication.
Witte also takes note of the fact that "even rockets that cause no injuries, as is usually the case, get extensive play on television." Apparently, Israelis must die or be injured before a rocket attack merits serious (but not "overdone") attention. Yet Witte himself wants to judge the success of the war by whether rockets are falling, without regard to their toll. He claims (or perhaps gloats) that the "military campaign has not achieved its objective of halting Hamas rocket fire."
In its own anti-Israel way, the Post has stumbled upon the most important fact about this war -- Israel still has a survival instinct. That instinct, though probably diminished, remains sufficient for the impudent Israelis to place their interest in not being attacked ahead of concern about world opinion; to focus primarily on how their people are faring in the war; and to support a war against its sworn, aggressor enemy, at least when that war is going reasonably well.
No wonder Witte and his paper are unhappy.