The rush to report.
Being first more important than being correct.
These are sometimes the hallmark of television news. Newsrooms and journalism schools across the land should use yesterday’s unbelievable gaffes by CNN and Fox News as teaching moments.
Within the newsrooms of CNN and Fox news, all staffers should have to sit and look at the Poynter website’s collection of screen shots from network websites and tweets:
On the other hand, watch Rachel Maddow’s segment to learn how a little blog did a better job than the Fox/CNN media giants – another lesson for journalists and for the public:
As Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart said, “No sympathy, CNN.”
AP reports that Fox wouldn’t admit its error: “Fox executive vice president of news and editorial, was unapologetic. “We gave our viewers the news as it happened,” he said.” And AP offered advice from one who got it right by going just a tad slower:
ABC’s Terry Moran had less than a minute to look at the decision before he was talking on the air to anchor George Stephanopoulos and he briefly vamped for time, saying “I’m just taking a quick look at it.”
Describing the difficulty of the process in an interview, he said, “you have to be confident enough to say, ‘I don’t know.'”
In this case, Moran quickly spotted that Roberts had decided the case in agreement with the court’s liberal justices, a sign that it was highly unlikely the health care law had been overturned. ABC did bobble one fact initially, incorrectly saying the court’s decision was by a 6-3 vote instead of 5-4.
Moran said Thursday’s lesson to journalists should be “slow down.”
“I actually think the audience is much more interested in understanding than in seeing who finishes first in this case,” he said. “In this day and age, there are few true scoops. … On an event like this, take a breath.”
We all – journalists and consumers – must learn from such historic errors. I will always remember Marquette basketball coach Al McGuire saying, “You have to learn from losing. Only a fool loses and doesn’t learn from it.” Let’s not forget this was not an isolated case. In 2003, I wrote – as did Chris Mooney and others – about live coverage by CNN, Fox and MSNBC of a press conference held by “a company linked to the UFO-obsessed Raelian sect (which) announced the birth of the world’s first cloned baby.”
No cloned baby by an extraterrestrial fan club.
No Supreme Court overturning of the mandate.
No reason to rush.
Many reasons to lose trust.
Will anyone learn from this?
The Photoshopped picture of President Obama (credit to Gary He) on President Truman’s body, recreating one of the previous historic journalistic rush to errors, is now available, suitable for framing in CNN, Fox, and newsrooms across the land – and deservedly so.
Addenda:
Comments
Please note, comments are no longer published through this website. All previously made comments are still archived and available for viewing through select posts.
Alan Timmerman
July 2, 2012 at 4:36 pmSometime I watch FOX for “infortainment” when I have nothing else to do and there is nothing else worth watching elsewhere on TV
Our Comments Policy
But before leaving a comment, please review these notes about our policy.
You are responsible for any comments you leave on this site.
This site is primarily a forum for discussion about the quality (or lack thereof) in journalism or other media messages (advertising, marketing, public relations, medical journals, etc.) It is not intended to be a forum for definitive discussions about medicine or science.
We will delete comments that include personal attacks, unfounded allegations, unverified claims, product pitches, profanity or any from anyone who does not list a full name and a functioning email address. We will also end any thread of repetitive comments. We don”t give medical advice so we won”t respond to questions asking for it.
We don”t have sufficient staffing to contact each commenter who left such a message. If you have a question about why your comment was edited or removed, you can email us at feedback@healthnewsreview.org.
There has been a recent burst of attention to troubles with many comments left on science and science news/communication websites. Read “Online science comments: trolls, trash and treasure.”
The authors of the Retraction Watch comments policy urge commenters:
We”re also concerned about anonymous comments. We ask that all commenters leave their full name and provide an actual email address in case we feel we need to contact them. We may delete any comment left by someone who does not leave their name and a legitimate email address.
And, as noted, product pitches of any sort – pushing treatments, tests, products, procedures, physicians, medical centers, books, websites – are likely to be deleted. We don”t accept advertising on this site and are not going to give it away free.
The ability to leave comments expires after a certain period of time. So you may find that you’re unable to leave a comment on an article that is more than a few months old.
You might also like