by Geneva Overholser, Washington Post columnist, former Post ombudsman, and former editor of Des Moines Register, Minnesota Journalism Center at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
As a charter member of [the Committee] I am struck by how needed I think the kind of attention that the Committee is giving to the issues facing journalism is at this moment...We're under enormous stress from change. Much of it is change that we should welcome...
The fact is, an effort to gather together and ponder where we are today and to think about what we can agree upon as our strengths and our principles so as to give voice to them seems to me to be one of the most important things we can do. I've just handed in a draft, thank God, of one of these American Journalism Review pieces, I don't know if you've been reading AJR, but the Pew Center funded a series of articles on the state of the American newspaper. The one I did was on the changing role of American editors.
And I was really struck in interviewing editors -- I completely over reported -- but part of the reason ... is that people really want to talk now and there is a strong feeling, I think, that the moments of difficulty and even resignation, hopelessness, I think, for some, that we've been through, to some degree in recent years, are giving way to a conviction that we ought to speak about what we feel to be the basic fundamental commitments of journalism. That when journalism is threatened, whether it's by too much emphasis on the market, too much emphasis on business principles, we need to speak out and say, here are the basics. Not in ways that simply cart on the sidelines, but in constructive and collaborative ways...And so I urge you all to participate in this discussion...
Anonymous sources, arrogance in the newsroom, failures of fairness, failures of good heartedness, and failures of balance. If you think about all of these like so much else that we do at our worst, these all go on partly because we are not thinking about the many ways day-to-day in which we should feel accountable to others...
Why do we fail so often in journalism at accountability? I don't think it's just moral laxity or self-centeredness or other ethical failings, although far be for me to let us off the hook on all those counts. But I do think there are some things about journalism that lead us correctly to question to what degree we should be responsive to others in regard to our work. In other words, there are some ways that we have schooled ourselves appropriately to guard against undue pressures, but which may result unfortunately in our failing to attend to some things we ought to attend to.
What do I mean by this? Let me give you three examples. We know in the abstract that we ought to be accountable to readers, right? But we also know that readers will often tell us they wish we hadn't said such and such or used this or that fact, or focused on X or Y or butted into something or other, interviewed some poor soul. We all know how often we are blamed as messenger when we did the right thing in bringing an unwelcome message. We have, in other words, schooled ourselves, even steeled ourselves, I would say, to be immune to some criticism some of the time for good reason.
I'll give you a second example. We know, again, in the abstract, that we have responsibilities towards sources, to name them correctly, to quote them accurately, but we also know that there are times when the relationship between journalists and sources of information is necessarily an adversarial one. That is in the interest of readers and in the pursuit of information there will be times when we will appropriately incur the anger of sources.
Finally, take bosses, and be honest now, have you ever felt that while, of course, you're accountable to the boss, you may have a better fix on an individual or a braver outlook on a possible story, so that you can pursue it despite advice against it and tell yourself, sometimes with justification, and sometimes even with eventual glory, that you are right to ignore the boss? I know I have and I certainly think most of us as editors these days, in fact, spend considerable amounts of time, if not defying the boss, at least trying to hard to soften the impact of dictates, maybe corporate dictates that we don't agree with, in the name of better journalism.
All of this is by way of saying that we journalists have grown up in the business with an understanding that refusing to listen to others, at least refusing too listen too hard under certain situations, can actually be a virtue. And I think that this feeling is part at least of why we go afoul on accountability. It's hard to separate being responsive from caving, being accountable from being a tool, being sensitive from being weak.
Well, that's all I'm going to do to try to understand our pain. Now, I'm going to move on to flogging us for our failures. That's what you expect from a speaker at this early time in the morning. Let me start by going directly to the question that was posed to me in my speaking invitation. What is the ideal standard of accountability? Perhaps I'm inspired by being part of a university with a fine medical school, but I would say the medical commitment, first do no harm, is not a bad one for us to keep in mind as a place to start. If we thought more often about the harm that we can do, indeed that we do do, whether to political figures, to our communities, to our profession, we would be better off and so would all of those folks whom I just mentioned. If we can accept that as a standard, at least to set out with, then let us move on to the very tough question, accountable to whom.
Here the answers are numerous... I decided that concentric circles are a good way to go at this. Let's start with the outside first. The marketplace, another phrase that was mentioned in my speech invitation. We have to be accountable to those who own us and to what motivates them. This accountability is a particularly difficult form for some of us because we don't always find the motivation of the marketplace harmonious with journalism, to understate the case. Yet we do have to understand the realities of those who own us and for most of us nowadays that means something about understanding the realities of Wall Street, because ignoring facts won't change anything.
But here we get to an important part of accountability. We are accountable to our newspaper's owners, but that doesn't necessitate being cowed or even being silenced. On the contrary, I would argue that we have a responsibility to speak our minds in intelligent, constructive ways where we can do so when we see harm to our newspapers...
In the next concentric circle I would place the public, and this is a particularly complex circle, because when I say public, I mean, we are accountable to society, to our democracy, to our civic life. This is a huge responsibility. What we choose to write about, how we write about it, where it's played, all these make an enormous difference to the public. When we overemphasize crime in the interest of attracting readers we harm our fellow citizens. When we leave out portions of the community in our coverage because they're less desirable demographically we do our society a grave disservice. When we deal endlessly with the problems, whether with Government, with young people, with the net, you name it. When we paint something as hopeless or endlessly corrupt we tear down our civic life.
Pulling in slightly from this notion of public to the next concentric circle, our communities. We are--we as newspapers and we as individuals--citizens in our community. When we confuse detachment with objectivity. When we fail to accept the degree to which we shape the views of our neighbors, affect the outcome of an election, choose which issues will come to the fore of the municipal agenda, the state agenda, even the national agenda, we are failing as citizens. It's worth mentioning here as an aside that newspapers use to be much better citizens in terms of local philanthropy, too, but that's another speech. I'd be glad to give that if anyone wants to ask.
The next circle is our readers, but I want to pause for a moment to consider the ground between these two circles, community and readers because I think lately we have been doing something very important and not very welcome here. We are increasingly defining those elements of our community that we will seek out as our readers. We define them when the circulation department decides what neighborhoods it will press, ... when we decide where we will keep vendor boxes, where we'll do home delivery. We define these elements that we will appeal to by covering certain parts of the community and not others, certain interests and not others. And increasingly it is dollar signs and not civic-mindedness that are driving these determinations and these definitions.
Now come with me into the newsroom, which of course is where we really live and where we confront the tough choices that we make every day. We are accountable, of course, to certain standards of journalism, to fairness and balance, accuracy and comprehensiveness. We are accountable to our sources, to quote them accurately, to present them fairly. As employers and employees we are accountable to one another. Editors have a responsibility to write candid and forthright performance reviews and not to fool themselves as so often we have into believing that kindness consists of soft-peddling the criticisms until the problem becomes so difficult that we come on like a lion. I've seen it happen more than once and, I must say, participated in it.
Editors have a responsibility to pay their employees fairly and give them opportunities commensurate with their talent and effort. And reporters and copy editors and photographers have responsibilities to work hard, to be thorough, to give of themselves and their talents richly. ... In the work place accountability is particularly challenged today, I think, because patterns of work are changing so quickly. With more and more corporate ownership, with increasing involvement in marketing, with better educated but much more itinerant staffs with new ways of organizing, such as teams and pods, we have experienced an enormous amount of change...
Bill Woo, the former editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, many of you know, I'm sure, is now teaching at Stanford and he was telling me the other day something interesting about the kind of research that he is doing. He is doing research on something called the organizational theory of accidents, I think it was, and as I understand it, this is the notion that the way an organization and entity is set up may in fact actually lead to an accident like Bopal or Three Mile Island or ValuJet. And he thinks that in this era when we're all concentrating so much on management in the newsroom there may be some link to the fact that we have been plagued with our own Bopal's, or New Republics, or Boston Globes. And that maybe part of the problem is that the accountability isn't strong enough. ... I can't help that maybe Bill is onto something. But, okay, how can we make the accountability link clearer, how can we strengthen it. Let's consider that question as I take up the final, going for the final stride here and we think about what we already do attempt to do. The most obvious answer to how do we now hold ourselves accountable is corrections, right? And how well do we do? Well, I would be hard pressed to give us better than a D. I mean, really, think about it. We brag about putting corrections in one location, we're anchoring them, we say, so that readers can be sure they will know where to find them. And that usually means we're kind of stuffing down at the bottom of page two.
It also means that when it pleases us we'll put the correction where else we want to. In sports ... or in the book review or in the health tab or, you know, whatever seems right at the moment. So it turns out that our commitment to consistency is strongest when used as a defense against he request to put corrections on the front page. You know, the demand, make the admission of errors as prominent as the story was. And we say, no, sorry we must anchor the corrections, not that corrections really are an admission of error.
Which brings me to the next complaint about them, the form. Yuck. Is it any wonder that corrections so often make their way into joke anthologies. You haven't a clue what was wrong when you read the typical correction, you know, "The number was wrong." Well, tell me, did you state it too big so I'll remember what mis-impression got into my head? Was it too small? I mean, give me a clue here. The motto seems to be admit as little as possible, say as little possible, take as little space as possible, and hope no one notices.
But here comes best part. Just try getting a correction into most papers. You think the reporter is going to push for it? Come on... That correction may show up on his or her performance review and same for the supervising editor. And by the time it gets to the top the editor thinks, well, if this really were needed it would have been taken care of lower down ... that's wrong. The public knows all this and so do sources.
I have to say, I gained new steam on this one as ombudsman at The Washington Post. I had been there maybe six months when I got a call from the First Lady's office. It's a staffer. He says, do you realize that the speech that the First Lady made in China, this was widely billed as her most important foreign policy speech, is was what, three years ago, I guess, now at a women's conference in Beijing. Big speech, State Department called it a big speech. The Post ran it on the front page, lead story, and then ran significant excerpts from it. But the excerpts were actually from a different very minor speech she had given to the WHO, World Health Organization that morning.
And, you know, to tell you the truth, I hadn't read the excerpts. So I went back and read them, it's just amazing, you read the very fine reporting from our Bureau Chief, from The Post Bureau Chief in Beijing. Then you read this excerpts and you think, what the hell? The speech didn't bear any relation to the excerpts. So the First Lady's office called and points this out. And I said, well, did you call the Foreign Desk? Yes we did. And I said, what did they say? Well, didn't she give both speeches? I said, you're kidding, honest to goodness? And I started into a hassle with the Foreign Desk that you would have thought I was a harpy flying in with no reason at all. ...They kept saying to me, well, she gave it, and she gave it the same day and, you know, they both allude in one point to abortion or something. ... After two days of they finally wrote this thing, they refused to call it a correction, they called it a clarification. And they didn't run different excerpts. And, I'm telling you, The Post is not alone in this. The public gets this. We are terrible on corrections. Maybe it's F, I think I'll move it to F. So much for corrections.
Now we come to ombudsmen. I think they are a good idea now that I have been one. Of course, when I was an editor, like most editors, I didn't think they were a good idea. I thought, you know, if I've got a slot here I'll have another cops reporter, plus it's my responsibility, I wear the mantle and I get the pay, well, that's fine. But two things, one, no editor has time really to be a good ombudsman, you just don't have time to take all the calls, to take them thoughtfully. To give readers the kind of time and attention that they want. And even more important, you don't have the right perspective.
It is amazing, when you're not responsible for something, how much more ready you are to really think, you know, maybe we blew it. Even the most dedicated editor trying hard not to be defensive wants in his or her heart to justify, to explain, to help you understand, well, let me help you understand what we did, the reader doesn't want that. The reader wants to say, boy, did you blow this. And, you know, that just sets most journalists off big time, whereas the ombudsman sits there and thinks, well, you know, this could be fodder for my columns. So there is a big difference.
Then there are reader advisory groups. I think they are a good idea. They get real people into the newspaper's consciousness. Invite a cross-section of readers to ponder the newspaper with you and its just amazing what you'll hear. Smaller versions of this concept are useful and used by many newspapers inviting people into the editorial sessions, into news meetings, et cetera. Then there are editor's columns. I think these can be an extremely strong tool as long as they're not self-justifications. I must say, I do not find that they are distinguished as an art form by candor and forthrightness. How many editors, for example, explained during the newsprint crisis a few years ago that they were having to cut this or that feature or shrink the news hole a bit in order to keep the profit margin from going from 21 to 18 say, instead just going 21 to 20. I mean, how many, when the crisis was over, mentioned newsprint price decreases as prominently as they had increases.
Then there is journalism criticism and I think this one of the most hopeful trends on the horizon. Content magazine ... it's onto something when you hear the howls that I heard, at least, from the Washington press corps. ... And the conversations, the kind of conversations that we are here participating in today, are very useful, I believe.
In the end, though, I'd say that the real accountability is individual accountability, and for those of you who are going into journalism, I really hope that you will think hard about this. Because this craft has enormous power, yet it operates in a climate virtually free of agreed-upon rules and an atmosphere of incredible freedom. And we are our own worst enemies in this atmosphere, inviting constraints on that freedom and courting reductions in our influence-- declining readership for one when we forget to hold ourselves accountable as institutions and as individuals.
Holding ourselves accountable means thinking with every phone call we get that that reader just might be right. ... It means really thinking, what is this reader is saying that I need to hear? It also means keeping in mind those we will never hear from who will never call us. Those with little power, and little status, and little reason to read the newspaper, the little hope that they will see themselves, or their worries in the newspapers. It means asking ourselves with every article we write and publish, no matter how small, how we would feel if we were the subject of it. It means keeping, keeping our thoughts on the impact on all of our work, being fair, showing negativity. It means thinking about our responsibility to a Government of the people, by the people, and for the people. What is it that the people need to know to govern themselves effectively? This is our driving force. It means thinking about our responsibility to our profession which is so privileged yet very fragile. And keeping always in mind that every individual failure becomes blot on the reputations of every one of us. You know, this, you've heard people say again and again, oh, no, I'm not going to talk to a reporter, I've been burned. That one burn has repercussions that go on and on for all of us. And then there will be the person who is wrong in most of our professional opinion to feel burned, but somebody needed to respond in ways that we fail to respond to have that be the lasting impression.
Finally, being accountable means bearing always in mind that remarkable gift, the First Amendment and the grand vision of those idealists who made all of our work possible by writing it. But remembering always that it is not our gift, it's the public's gift. Keeping all these things in mind, it will at least be harder, I think, to be arrogant. And if I had to nominate one great enemy of accountability that would be it. Guard against it with everything you've got for your sake and for the sake of all the rest of us.
