Confession may be good for the soul, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
It hasn’t been for executives of Bridgestone/Firestone. It isn’t for newspaper reporters and editors.
You think Bill Clinton split hairs answering questions about Monica Lewinsky? (Did they ever decide what is the definition of “is”?) You ought to see some of the contortions we journalists go through to avoid having to say we’re sorry, that we got it wrong.
Such stubbornness isn’t necessarily bad. A favorite tactic of bad guys who have been exposed is to huff and puff that they’ve been wronged and to threaten retaliation. (This usually is followed in fairly short order by a plea agreement with prosecutors.) Confrontations with such characters are not for those weak of will or unsure of their facts.
If a serious news organization does not feel certain of a story it plans to publish, then it ought not publish it. And if it does publish, it ought to stand by the story unless it is proven to be in error.
Likewise for a reporter. If he or she is uncertain about a fact or a claim, it ought not go into a story. And if the purported fact or claim does go in, the reporter ought to be prepared to back it up.
But journalism is, ultimately, a human endeavor, and humans are fallible. They write headlines about “average family wages” when what they mean is “median household income” (see Page 1 of the Sept. 27 Tribune). They get wrong the description of scoring in Olympic beach volleyball (see Sports, Sept. 27). They get a name wrong in a story and then again in a correction (see Page 3 Thursday). And every once in a while, they commit a real whopper.
For the last week or so, the buzz in newspaper circles has been about The New York Times and its extraordinary editors’ note, “The Times and Wen Ho Lee.” Published on Page 2 of the newspaper’s Sept. 26 editions, the note amounted to a public confession–not of error or unfairness toward Lee, the former weapons scientist at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, but of falling “short of our standards in our coverage of this story.”
The editors’ note was followed two days later by an editorial that consumed the entire editorial column and that purported to examine the conscience of the editorial page in the same way that the editors in charge of news coverage had examined their consciences.
Interestingly, the news editors seemed tougher on themselves, confessing some journalistic mortal sins while their editorial page counterparts confessed only venial ones. The news editors compiled a veritable litany of stories they should have done but didn’t. And they didn’t, the note implied, because they had committed the journalistic equivalent of original sin: deciding early on that Wen Ho Lee was the bad guy.
In fact, like Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh–and despite Lee’s guilty plea to just one of an original 59 charges and the judge’s rhetorical spanking of the government–the Times’ editors clearly aren’t yet convinced that he’s not. “Our coverage of this case is not over,” their note ends defiantly.
The New York Times is greatly respected but not much loved among American journalists. It’s big and powerful and good–but it also is smug and arrogant. There probably were a lot of journalists who were happy to see it humbled a bit.
But I didn’t see or hear much evidence of gloating in the Tribune newsroom, and I think I know why. The only folks who can afford to gloat when someone stubs his toe as The Times did are those who never attempt anything big or bold or daring. Those folks will never be embarrassed–but they’ll never do anything important either.
This newspaper, like every serious newspaper, attempts bold, daring, important things: a powerful investigation of prosecutorial misconduct; a probe of nursing errors and the factors that lead to them; an examination of flaws in the state’s death penalty apparatus.
When you attempt great things, you are bound to make mistakes. You hope they’re small and readily correctable. But small or large, they are inevitable. Because journalism is, in the end, a human endeavor.
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E-mail: dwycliff@tribune.com
