From Mining Disaster to Media Disaster

In Chapter 6 of Blur, “Evidence and the Journalism of Verification,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel tell the story of the January 2, 2006, Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia to illustrate the journalist’s need to verify information by knowing it as opposed to merely relying on observation.

The tragedy of the mine’s explosion was compounded by the tragedy of the media’s misreporting of the number of survivors.  Thirteen miners were trapped in the mine.  Initial media reports went out saying twelve miners had survived (meaning one hadn’t), but the reality was horribly, ironically the opposite: twelve miners had perished and only one had survived.

Ariail, Robert.  Robert Ariail.  "The Miners Are Alive!"  Editorial Cartoon.  The State.  6 Jan. 
2006.

I remember this story well and have used it in Journalism I before in a discussion of ethics.

Like many newspapers across the country, Columbia’s newspaper, The State, published the story on January 4, 2006.

Once the truth of the number of survivors came out, the media’s thought and decision-making processes were evaluated in detail.

On January 5, 2006, The State ran two explanatory pieces about what went wrong from the media’s perspective.  Unfortunately, a quick search of the internet didn’t produce any links to these pieces.

The first was headlined “Late-hour revelation hamstrings media” with the deck “A Chronology of Confusion.” This was a sort of standalone that included a timeline attributed to Cox News Service and graphics of other newspapers’ front pages showing how they had published the same error.

The other explanatory piece, a story headlined “Erroneous reports lead to media soul-searching,” was datelined New York and attributed to wire reports.  The story details how the news of the real death toll wasn’t widely known until after most newspapers, particularly on the East Coast, had already printed and begun distribution, whereas newspapers on the West Coast were a bit more reliable because of the time difference: The Sacramento Bee published the story headlined “Joy to Despair,” and the Los Angeles Times was able to recall trucks of papers with incorrect stories.

      

In a rather quaint fashion (compared to today’s lightning-fast social media reporting), the story pointed out that most internet and television news outlets were able to correct the mistake before many news consumers woke up that morning.

The State localized the story in a sidebar by explaining its own publication timing and showing graphics of two different versions of the paper’s front page.  The first edition, printed to be sent to the far reaches of the state (Charleston, Greenville, Myrtle Beach, Spartanburg) ran a story headlined “One body recovered; ‘we need a miracle.’”  The Capital Final edition, which is the version most Columbia-area residents would have received, was redesigned and sent the presses in about thirty minutes with the headline “12 miners rescued; 1 dead.”

I see now that combined with The State’s former staff cartoonist, Robert Ariail, and his perspective (the cartoon above is so old, it’s not even in his online archives), along with the discussion of the events in Blur, these explanatory pieces can be used to teach other concepts aside from ethics: building relationships with the audience, gathering and use of evidence, independent confirmation, skepticism, sourcing, transparency, verification.

If only this gold mine of a lesson hadn’t come from a coal mine of disaster. 

Relevant Revelations

This past week, I had lunch with my friend John, thanks to some dead presidents.  No, not dead presidents as in money but dead presidents as in time—Presidents’ Day.

As I was bundling up to leave the restaurant and face the frigid winter temperatures that have descended upon us, I spied a reporter from WIS, Columbia’s NBC affiliate, at a nearby table.  Out in the parking lot, I asked John if he had seen her, and he informed me he didn’t even know who I was talking about because he hardly ever watches the local television news; in fact, he couldn’t even pinpoint his last memory of tuning in to the local news.

Skyline.  Columbia, South Carolina.  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (May 30, 
2010). 

This revelation may not amaze anyone, considering how America’s news-consumption habits are rapidly changing, but this is a response I would expect from, as Tina Fey so eloquently put it on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live’s fortieth anniversary special just the night before, “whatever you call the little dummies who are live-tweeting this right now instead of watching it.”

Now, John is no dummy, and at just a couple of years older than me, he is in his mid-thirties…well, okay—mid-forties (I suppose I must try to maintain a few shreds of credibility here as a journalism teacher), so he doesn’t fit Fey’s description.  To top it all off, John is a lawyer who works closely with county governments in South Carolina. 

So shouldn’t a lawyer associated with county governments keep abreast of local news?

I quizzed John about where he gets his news, and, of course, he responded that he gets it online because it’s available instantly.  He went on to say how he sees local news increasingly cluttered with meaningless fluff pieces presented by anchors who aren’t really engaging to him.  John’s scorn over the word anchor was even evident.

I later scanned my copy of The Elements of Journalism to see if John had received a ghostwriting credit!  It was as if Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel were right there with us.

In Chapter 8, “Engagement and Relevance,” the authors discuss the effects infotainment has had on the news industry and its wisdom (or lack thereof) as a business strategy.  They cite the research that says viewers are becoming apathetic in their choice of local news stations, if they even watch at all—and what a dramatic decline that figure has experienced.

So where does John get his news?  His top choice is—another shocking disclosure—Google News (and I almost passed out when he used the word aggregator—many commoners outside of journalism probably would have thought he’d mispronounced the word alligator), followed by local news alerts sent to his phone from news outlets in Columbia and Greenville, about two hours away.

As Bill and Tom and John departed the chilly parking lot, I thought back on the most fascinating revelation of the day—during a discussion over lunch of the snow predicted for Columbia this past week (which never materialized) and memories of past snowfalls, John revealed he had been a school bus driver when he was in high school.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around that news alert. 

You Can’t Please Everyone…

Since this week’s topic for the Social Role of the Mass Media class is a continuation of last week’s topic, handling sensitive issues, I thought I would make this blog post sort of a continuation of my topic last week, the shooting on the University of South Carolina campus.

I realized I hadn’t looked at any of the coverage done by the university’s student newspaper.  When I was a student there, The Gamecock came out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and may have been at most eight pages each predominately black-and-white issue.  Now The Daily Gamecock publishes daily and, of course, has an online presence, which put last week’s coverage at my fingertips.

Capstone House.  University of South Carolina.  Columbia, South Carolina.  1967.  
Modern style.  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (May 30, 2010). 

A special memorial edition of the newspaper was published last Friday, the day after the murder-suicide.  Also that morning, the Editor-in-Chief, Hannah Jeffrey, posted an editorial headlined “Letter from the Editor: Why you won't find individuals' names in Friday's paper.”

In the piece, Jeffrey explains the thought process behind the newspaper’s decision to not publish the names of the victim and the assailant that Friday morning since official word had not yet come from the Richland County Coroner (long after the paper’s press run). 

Exactly what we’ve been immersed in the past couple of weeks: Sensitivity.  Verification.  Transparency.  Maintaining credibility.  Time being the enemy of accuracy.  Informing the reader of editorial choices.

How professional of Jeffrey to explain the decision to the reader when so many rumors surely would have been traveling all over campus and Columbia.  Some of the posted comments agreed with her, applauding the decision for its good journalism and ethical standards.

Interestingly, though, a few of the comments harkened to this week’s other newsworthy topic: Brian Williams.  Some of the readers accused The Daily Gamecock staff of tooting its own horn and making the news about the staff instead of the murdered professor.

“You see, you can’t please everyone,” as Rick Nelson sang in “Garden Party.”

But Jeffrey did what she thought was right for her readers.

“So you’ve got to please yourself.”

Close to Home

Well, I wish this one hadn’t fallen into my lap.

Today at approximately 12:56 P.M., a shooting, an apparent murder-suicide, occurred at the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina, my alma mater and less than five miles from my house.

Detail.  McKissick Museum.  University of South Carolina.  
Columbia, South Carolina.  1939.  Works Progress Administration 
Romanesque style.  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (August 
15, 2009). 

Coincidentally, at about the same time, a car accident occurred just outside the building at the corner of Assembly and College streets (USC is an open, downtown campus), so among all of the confusion, the misinformation began to fly on social media.  According to WIS, Columbia’s NBC affiliate, rumors of the shooting’s nature and location were spread on social media: It was an active shooter situation.  It took place on the Horseshoe, the original part of campus.  At Russell House, the university union.  Even at the South Carolina State House, just blocks away.

WIS devoted all of its 5:00 and 5:30 news broadcasts to the event (with only a two-minute look at the weather) and much of its 6:00 broadcast.  The reporter on the scene, after discussing the inaccurate social media reports with the evening anchor, who had joined her there, then exhorted the audience to verify any information before sharing it on social media.

Details are still emerging as I listen to WIS’s 7:00 news report, most of which is devoted to the shooting, but I’ve already noticed a little time is being devoted to sports, weather, and traffic, but no other news has been reported.

Not only is this story close to home geographically, but it’s also close to home as far as the Social Role of Mass Media class goes.  Verification.  Erroneous Twitter reports.  Accuracy.  Completeness.  Sensitive issues.  All of these were topics of this week’s class readings.  And all of these issues are embodied in this story:

Verification?  The reporter chose the responsible route by asking the public to verify information before sharing on social media to minimize the spread of mistaken reports. 

Erroneous Twitter reports?  The rumors in those initial reports have been dispelled…but will probably be replaced by others. 

Completeness?  Obviously the story is incomplete at the moment, so much of the 7:00 news involved reiterating and discussing—no information about the two who died can be released until the Richland County coroner gives approval. 

Accuracy?  WIS is, for many, the best source of television news in the Midlands, so I’m sure accuracy is something each reporting team is striving for.

Sensitive issue?  Definitely.  
  

Back to Business

“In deed if not in name, by 2000 America’s journalistic leaders had been transformed into businesspeople.  Half of newspaper newsroom leaders reported that they spent at least a third of their time not on journalism but on business matters” (70).

So write Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in The Elements of Journalism.  As a teacher of journalism, I was struck by how closely this statement could apply to the field of education.  Just substitute a few words, and you’ll have a description of most educational leaders I know: We spend a great deal of our time on business matters instead of what really matters—the students.

Harry Truman's second grade report card (1894).  Harry S. Truman Presidential 
Museum & Library.  Independence, Missouri.  Photographed by Stephen Milligan 
(June 28, 2014).

The term “educational leaders” conjures up images of principals, assistant principals, and district office officials, but I would argue the real educational leaders are the teachers, the ones actually doing the work of education.

Unfortunately, it seems the real work of education, like the real work of journalism Kovach and Rosenstiel refer to, is increasingly moving toward the business end of things.  Like those newsroom leaders who spend one-third of their time on business, I would venture to estimate many teachers spend much more than a third of their time on endless paperwork, incessant meetings, and other administrivia.

And just like those journalists who don’t get to spend that time on journalism, those teachers don’t get to spend their time on educating the students.

January 16 was a teacher work day, one of those rare days all teachers hungrily look for on the district calendar because they know they will have time (that beautiful, elusive, ephemeral notion) unencumbered by meetings (we hope) to make a dent in some of that business work: lesson plans to be written; papers to be graded and recorded; handouts, tests, quizzes, exams, activities, and/or projects to be typed, formatted, and copied; guidance referrals, discipline referrals, attendance referrals, Student Intervention Team referrals, nurse referrals, and/or social worker referrals to be filled out; parents to call, e-mail, or send letters to; e-mail messages and phone calls to respond to…and those are just a few of the things all teachers do—throw in an extracurricular activity, club, organization, and/or sport to sponsor, and you add a whole other dimension of paperwork and business to take care of.

Now I know how those journalistic leaders—those newsroom leaders—feel because they don’t have time to devote their full attention to their craft, journalism.  I remember how elated I was when January 16 rolled around—I would have time to do my paperwork job without those pesky students hovering around needing attention and an education!

And as a teacher of journalism, I feel doubly put upon by this emphasis on business.  Each profession alone is evolving into a business…put them together, and you have big business.

What’s a business without customers?  District leaders love to throw that word around.  Students, parents, and visitors are “customers,” and we must practice good “customer service” when dealing with them.  Customers have become an important part of the journalist’s business, too:

“Bringing business accountability to the newsroom brought the language of business as well.  In some cases this meant applying the language of marketing to news, with readers and viewers becoming ‘customers,’ and to understand them became ‘marketing’” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 83).

So here I am—an English education major who stumbled into journalism and now has become a businessman.  Enough lamenting my fate for now, though—I have some customer papers to grade.

Reference
Kovach, Bill and Tom Rosenstiel.  The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect.  Third      Edition.  New York: Three Rivers Press, 2014.

The Eyes Have It

Week 2 and another topic has fallen into my lap.  Can I be so lucky for the next fourteen weeks?  Probably not, so let me take advantage of this while I can.

Tuesday I went to Eye Associates of Cayce for my yearly exam.  After the doctor had completed her preliminary examination, she assaulted my eyes with those drops to dilate them and announced that in the meantime, I had to take the test to identify those faint dancing squiggly lines on a screen.  Certainly, the early stages of pupil dilation could only add to the ease of the task.

Detail.  Dillon County Courthouse.  Dillon, South Carolina.  William Augustus Edwards, 
Architect.  1911.  Beaux Arts/Classical Revival/Neoclassical style.  National Register of 
Historic Places (October 30, 1981).  Photographed by Stephen Milligan (April 18, 2014). 

An assistant, Bart, came in to lead me across the hall for this test, and he complimented me on how nice I looked (in my new vest and tie), commenting that so many people these days appear in public in pajama bottoms.  I told him I’d seen kids trying to do that at school.  The inevitable questions followed, and he divulged he had a degree in English (but could never teach).  After a proper amount of time discussing the horrible state of people’s grammar these days, particularly on social media, he began quizzing me on teaching journalism.

As our poor-grammar-on-social-media discussion turned into a journalism discussion, Bart revealed his mistrust of many of the “news” items people post online, and how he always takes the time to check out such postings before he believes them. 

By this time, he had escorted me back to the examination room, where I gestured to the notebook of readings for this class I’d brought with me to kill time in the waiting room.  Or it may have been the doctor’s charts—at this point my vision was getting fuzzier by the minute.  But I could clearly see Bart for who he really was.  A literate consumer of news—right here in South Carolina!  I should have placed him in a jar with holes punched in the lid.

I told him I was currently taking a journalism class, and this exact topic was up for discussion.  News literacy.  Healthy skepticism.  The spread of news on social media.  Verification.

Bart mentioned when he wanted serious news and perspective, he looked to a variety of trustworthy sources—aside from WIS (the local NBC affiliate) and The State (Columbia’s newspaper), both of which so many around here rely on—including the BBC and Al Jazeera.  Indicating my notebook (or that stack of charts) again, I told him about the piece we had to read about the American Time magazine covers as opposed to the international covers, and that launched us into a discussion American news tastes and the perception of Americans by others.

I then admitted to Bart I was a bit skeptical of the citizen journalist concept—and he agreed!  I told him about the idea of Open Journalism we’d just read about in The Elements of Journalism: the professional journalist sourcing eyewitness accounts from social media and combining them with his or her expertly gathered background information to bring the news consumer the best of the old and the new—and a more complete story along with it.  Perhaps this is the best answer…it’s certainly an answer I can grow comfortable with.  Better than just swallowing social media news wholesale, Open Journalism allows news to be filtered through the trained eye of the professional journalist who can use his or her lens to verify and help the reader or viewer make sense of everything.

In the interim, I am looking forward to my next eye exam.  Perhaps one day, Bart and I can frolic at the Cayce-West Columbia Riverwalk, feeding the ducks and reciting the First Amendment in a beautiful montage set against “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash...

What Is News?

What better way to start off a blog than with a nice dose of hypocrisy?

My friend Noel down in Florida posted this on Facebook just this past week: 

How clever and timely of Noel down in Florida to have posted this—he must have sensed I would need a topic for this blog.

Now, I have a confession to make: I absolutely hate it when people “share” things like this on Facebook, so much so that I’ve actually begun to hate the word share.  I want to see friends’ photos and hear about what’s going on in their lives—that’s why I go on Facebook—not to see the latest “share” of a recipe they’ll never make or household project they’ll never complete, Photoshopped kitten or puppy doing something cute, vintage drawing with sarcastic comment, command to “share if you agree the President is (or is not) doing a good job,” or sappy photo of someone holding a hand-scrawled sign saying he was allegedly left on the hospital steps thirty years ago and is now looking for his parents.

Sure, some of those things are cute or inspiring (but most are annoying).  And one can’t help reading them as one wades through the Facebook news feed searching for a morsel of personal news someone has posted.  I make it a rule to never comment on these incessant “shares,” and I certainly have never posted one, nor will I ever.

But I did save this one to—dare I say it—share with you, the students of John Bowen’s Social Role of the Mass Media class.

“What is News?” asked Discussion Board Question 1 in relation to the Duck Dynasty controversy.  I think Duck Dynasty definitely belongs in the right column.  Are these items newsworthy?  Some of them certainly are.  Some of them certainly are not.  Entertainment news, perhaps…some might even say gossip or frivolity.  And everyone occasionally indulges in a little escapism, a little junk food, a little fluff, and a small dose of it is probably needed to maintain one’s sanity in the face of all the items in the left column.  But it’s when the items in the right column outweigh those in the left column that we have a problem, when the audience becomes consumed with the immaterial at the expense of the germane. 

Is the media to blame for producing such content, or is the media merely giving the audience what it wants?  Is coverage of the topics in the left column socially responsible journalism?  Conversely, is coverage of the topics in the right column socially irresponsible journalism?  I suppose we will tackle these and other weighty questions over the next sixteen weeks.

In the meantime, please don’t share anything with me.  Unless it’s chocolate.