Competency in the Newsroom - Session 2: Discussion Continues with Questions from the Audience

Audience Question: "My name is Doron Levin. I was struck by Mr. Larson's notion of the bullshit detector. I suddenly realized that in 20 years in journalism what is happening to me is that I rely on my bullshit detector less and less because I think that I know less about what people really are talking about and I have to dig more until I really find the root of what they're getting at..."

John Larson: "I agree with you. I have noticed in my career that it seems like the longer the people are in the business, frequently the detectors start to get weaker and weaker. It's not a function of not having one, it's a function of reacting to other people's expectations of what they think the news is.

"I used to yell at my editors. They used to sit and meet in the story room. There's no windows in the story room. I used to say you guys watch too much TV. Go outside in the parking lot, or walk around town or something. They have an idea of what that press conference is supposed to be, or whatever it is. Then you go out there and your detectors start going off, but you constantly are being yanked by what the expectations are and you stop listening to your own sense of what's true. The only question is, how do we get around that?

"Clearly, we have to deal with the expectations of our editors, and yet we have to open a dialogue on, maybe for the next day or the next week where we say wait a minute, the way this is being discussed is only half true. You start to get other ideas for people about how you might get a new sense of truth. I think a lot of it has to do with the diversity or who you actually are talking to."

Audience Question: "I have a question for Professor Meyer. It seems like the emphasis here is on an increase in empathy and development of personal virtues. ... If you think that a scientific process needs to be reincorporated with journalistic practices. How are those two ideas compatible?"

Phil Meyer: "It's the old debate between objectivity and subjectivity. A lot of the post-modern journalists say we should abandon objectivity because it's impossible. I prefer to redefine objectivity. Traditionally it has sort of meant you sprinkle your ink around to lots of different groups and hope that it comes out even or fair.

"I think we ought to emphasize objectivity of method. That's really what scientific method is. Our humanity, our subjective impulses, our kindness and so forth, is directed toward deciding what to investigate by objective means.

"The example that Buzz Merit uses in defending public journalism is Jonas Salk cared very much about saving the lives of children with his invention of the polio vaccine, but in the development of that vaccine he used objective, verifiable, reputable scientific method. I think journalism in applying scientific method, uses the same process."

Hodding Carter: "Let me put it to you that the pyramid, which has been a wonderful device for this discussion is lacking both a base and an apex. The base is money, and the apex is editing. Editing, it seems to me, is the absolute critical ingredient of competence -- an unpopular motion for those of my generation who came into reporting to learn that they were the central feature of everything that had to do with journalism.

"If you don't start with the recognition that what is truly shameful about a level of competence is a level of investment in the product, you don't really have a pyramid that you can discuss very sensibly. And at the end of the day, if you don't understand all of these in a hierarchical system which is still in most, though not all newsrooms, editing, you can't have competence.

"I would say a circle around this pyramid would be the absolute necessity brought home with the notion that cooperation is the circle within this game that's going to be absolutely required to be competent, which again, eliminates the notion as the reporter solely as lone ranger, and increasingly as someone who has got to deal with someone who knows better about that subject within the newsroom as well as outside to do a good job."

John Larson: "One thought on money. I've always been fighting money issues wherever I've been, and I would certainly agree that competence is a function of money. But I've also really noticed that incompetence is a function of money, and incompetence really costs a lot. Not only in lawsuits, obviously, as we've seen in the news, but people wind up covering a lot of stuff incompetently where if somebody would have just said let's not do that, let's do less better, we would have had the resources we needed on a particular news day."

Mercedes de Uriarte: "I'd just like to make one comment. It must have been very expensive to spend so much time -- both air time and print time -- talking about all the speculation surrounding the Clinton endeavor and at the same time ignoring -- to go back to one of the first questions that was raised, comments that the Pope was making about our role in the economic boycott of Cuba. Certainly a subject that warrants some very thoughtful consideration by American citizens."

"So it seems to me that while some of this stuff is expensive and that money is involved, it is the distribution of economic prowess and in the gathering of news that we might need to spend a little more attention focusing on."

Trevor Brown: "Let me support Hodding's assertions with two anecdotes. The other day I was advising an honor student on her thesis, and she is so smart and so energetic, I thought by golly, here's the salvation of journalism. I asked her if she'd found a job yet. She said no, I'm going to law school. (Laughter) This happens a lot. The brighter students, there's no pre-law curriculum at Carolina, so the brighter students use us as a pre-law curriculum.

"The other was I got a phone call from an editor at a medium sized paper in the south who said his computer-assisted reporter had just left and did I have a May graduate coming up who could replace him. I said well, I can give you a couple of names. Where is your reporter going? To a larger paper? He said no, he's going into high tech industry.

"So in both cases I think it's the economics of the news business that doesn't support the competence that we need to survive, and there's a paradox there. And Hodding is absolutely right to worry about it. I just don't know that there's any solution to it."

John Larson: "I think the Jewell case was one of the lower moments in recent history of the news media. The Atlanta Constitution editor who originally decided to go with that story said in explanation, there was no way I was going to get beat on this story in my own home town. But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was something that Bill Kovach alluded to in his opening remarks. That is that the failsafe mechanisms that were once sort of built into the way American journalists did their work have been eliminated. That is if you do not independently check out what the Atlanta Constitution and NBC reported last night, but you report it because they reported it, then you don't have any additional checks. You simply have the one decision by the one gatekeeper to go with a story and there are no further tripwires that have to be met. That was the problem with the Jewell case...

"So the answer to the problem is what Bill suggested. News organizations have to go back to making independent judgment about newsworthiness based on their reporting, their own reporting, as against basing them on the fact that somebody else has reported it. That's the study that the Committee of Concerned Journalists did about the Lewinsky case is about; the reporting of what others are reporting. So I think that's ultimately going to be the answer. Whether we can return to that system when everybody tells us we're awash in a world of 24 hour information, blah, blah, blah, is another question. But I think that's how to do it."

Mercedes de Uriarte: "I'd just like to add, I think you make a distinction that increasingly people are making and making appropriately and strongly. That is to differentiate between public figures and what rights of privacy they may or may not have, and people who are unwittingly thrust into the spotlight. It is being talked about more. There are many people in journalism who are very concerned about it, and increasingly, in responsible journalistic institutions that distinction is also being made at the time of coverage. You can see it I think most often when people think of, for instance, local crime victims or relatives of crime victims or relatives of deceased in accidents and things like that, that responsible organizations will give them a wall of privacy that they would not afford others, and are more and more discussing when it is appropriate, and even assuming that there are different standards in different situations for different people."

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