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Monday, July 05, 2004

Well Surprise, Surprise, Surprise! 
You ever notice that every time you use vanilla cake mix to bake a cake, you always seem to wind up with vanilla cake?

I've tried everything. I add eggs. I skip the eggs. I add more milk. Less milk. More baking soda. Less baking soda. More extract. Less extract. No matter what I do, I always seem to wind up with vanilla cake! Go figure!

Which brings me to this from Daily Telegraph.

A significant number of BBC news reports are untrustworthy and littered with errors because the corporation's journalists fail to check their facts, according to e-mails sent by one of the BBC's most senior news managers. His messages reveal that the credibility of the news service is "on the line" because of a climate of sloppiness.


The leaked e-mails sent by Hugh Berlyn, an assistant editor of BBC News Online, show that despite the furore surrounding the Gilligan report, dozens of "unvetted" stories appear on the internet every day. The result is a string of stories that are, at best, littered with errors and, at worst, inaccurate and potentially libellous.

In an e-mail last October, Mr Berlyn said journalists were not showing their reports to managers, who are supposed to check them in accordance with BBC rules. He wrote: "Yesterday we carried out a study of how many of your stories were being properly checked by a second pair of eyes before publication. To my surprise and concern, more than 60 stories around the country were apparently published without being second-checked."


Guys, it isn't just the BBC.

The entire profession is melting down. And will continue to melt down as long as "professional ethics" are routinely trumped by "the scoop."

When newspapers advertise on JournalismJobs.com, they're always asking for an aggressive reporter who can 'break news' and 'scoop' the competition.

Yeah, you do have to 'break news' eventually.

But how come I never see a newspaper help-wanted ad that goes something like this:

Main Street Daily seeks a meticulous, thorough, and fair-minded reporter with a strong commitment to accuracy, objectivity, and transparency. The ideal candidate should demonstrate a knack for 'negative capability' and letting the facts of the story speak for themselves. The candidate will be expected to attend frequent press conferences and should understand that her target audience at these conferences is her readership, not the source, and not the other journalist. In short, the ideal candidate will exhibit a distaste for showmanship.

She will be sceptical without cynicism, and work quickly but not in haste. Above all, given the current state of our industry,she should have a strong ethical grounding in some profession other than journalism!


They can change the rule books and style manuals until the cows come home. But they're just fiddling with the recipe at the margins.

Until newspapers start recruiting these kinds of people, and eschewing the young turks out more to make names for themselves than to tell the story, the problems with accuracy will continue.

It's time to start using a whole different cake mix.

Splash, out

Jason


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