All Blog Posts from Public Eye

The ever-prolific Joe Strupp of Editor and Publisher today takes his column to commemorate Father’s Day, admit that he’s 41 years old, and note that he thinks – given this Sunday’s 35th anniversary of the Watergate burglary – that the Watergate story would be broken if it happened today. But there would be a few more hiccups.

Strupp writes that the constant news cycle would lead to mistakes, that a cell phone camera might have gotten a snapshot of Deep Throat in the garage, and that the pressures against keeping his identity secret would have been ratcheted up dramatically. But at the end of the day, he writes, the truth would come out.

Careful reviews and triple-checking of facts are often not done in time. During their award-winning reporting, much of it done over days and weeks, the Watergate reporters had their share of goofs and mistakes, but far fewer than the scoops and revelations that made such coverage valuable, and able to stand up to the scrutiny of those who regularly sought to criticize it.

Strupp is on far more than he’s off-base, but I have to take serious issue with this. On the commemorative DVD re-release of “All The President’s Men” a few years ago, Jonathan Alter observed “If Watergate happened today, for several reasons, it probably wouldn't be exposed … which is kind of scary."

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If you work at a daily newspaper, it’s probably more likely than not that you’ve been accused of bias in the past year. At least that’s what Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University found among the 527 randomly selected newspaper journalists at 218 daily papers in the U.S. that it surveyed, reports Editor & Publisher. (The full report will be available here sometime later today.)

Considering the ever-growing presence of organizations predicated on identifying such bias, this is not a terribly surprising piece of information. More interesting was that according to the report, those who had been accused of bias "often blame poor editing as contributing to inaccuracy in their articles." E&P also notes that “sources, anonymous or not, also were viewed as ‘problematic and potentially leading to factual errors…’” Wrote E&P:

Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they suspected a source was deliberately misleading them; 31 percent said that they had been misled by a source; 35 percent learned that one of their published stories had contained false information provided by a source; and 33 percent had concerns about a source that caused them to review a story with their newspapers' legal counsel.

In addition to the negative affect on the industry of numerous incidents of plagiarism, the report also found that, "newspaper journalists say problems in television news, on Web sites and blogs, and even in tabloids and shopper publications all have a deleterious effect on the credibility of newspaper journalists. In addition, almost one in five say that criticism of media by politicians erodes readers' trust."

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