Category: Feature articles

If you ask Carroll Bogert, crime news in the U.S. is broken.

Building off renewed interest in the Central Park Five case spurred by Ava Duvernay’s Netflix series “When They See Us,” Bogert attacked criminal justice coverage in a May 2019 op-ed published by the Los Angeles Times and the Marshall Project, the nonprofit criminal justice news outlet where Bogert serves as president.

“News coverage has contributed to wrongful convictions and, more generally, to decades of draconian criminal justice policy,” she said.

The Netflix miniseries follows the arrest, conviction, prison sentences and eventual exoneration of five young men who came to be known as the Central Park Five. The series has had considerable impact, affecting key players in the case. A prosecutor who advanced a theory that the defendants formed a “wolf pack” to attack a jogger lost a lucrative publishing contract. Another gave up her position in the Columbia University Law School.

Yet media outlets that swallowed the “wolf pack” framing whole and uncritically echoed the prosecution’s story seem to have escaped largely unscathed. The New York Daily News even republished its infamous “Wolf Pack’s Prey” story in 2013, never noting its role in amplifying a false narrative.

Today, the criminal justice system is at the center of bipartisan legislation and partisan debates. It’s also increasingly a focus of media coverage, with national outlets rolling out major investigations and newer nonprofit news outlets such as The Appeal and The Marshall Project reporting exclusively on the topic.

But crime is local, and so is most of the crime reporting Americans see. Some veterans on the beat worry that local newsrooms, increasingly asked to do more with less, may inadvertently harm themselves, their communities or the institution of journalism with their coverage. To report responsibly on this high-profile and complex beat, they say, newsrooms will need new ethical standards, deep conversations, better training and more diversity in the ranks.

‘Where is the line?’

Keri Blakinger now reports for the Houston Chronicle, where she spends much of her time covering prison conditions, but some of the toughest ethical decisions she’s wrestled with as a journalist came on her first beat: breaking crime news.

It’s a common assignment for the youngest and least experienced reporters, who typically have no background in criminal justice. “I get why that happens,” Blakinger said, “but it means that the people who have to face these questions everyday don’t have the years of knowledge developed to be able to ask questions as broadly, in many cases.”

Reporters face decisions about what crimes are worth covering or whether to run a mugshot photo, Blakinger said, and in the current media environment, many will have to decide on their own.

“Maybe you have a really good editor who has a good sense of this. Maybe your editor doesn’t give a shit,” Blakinger said.

For Blakinger, these questions are personal. Having spent 21 months behind bars following a 2010 drug arrest, she remembers what it was like to see her own mugshot in the newspaper.

But in her first reporting job, she sometimes found herself writing the kind of low-level crime stories that she now feels might do more harm than good. These questions later became a source of newsroom dialogue.

“We definitely started having a lot more discussions about ‘Where is the line?’” Blakinger said, noting that what might count as a newsworthy crime at that alt-weekly in Ithaca, New York, was different than at the Houston Chronicle. “It’s a little bit of a different ballgame when one of the towns you’re covering has 5,000 people.”

Newsrooms need to talk about these things, Blakinger said, so individual reporters don’t have to make these choices on their own.

‘The equivalent of eating a giant bowl of M&Ms’

Some veteran crime journalists criticize the “If it bleeds, it leads” editorial approach, arguing that the most important stories are often not the most dramatic — or the most popular.

Janine Anderson, who spent eight years covering crime and courts for Wisconsin newspapers, quickly learned that she could churn out a high volume of stories based on the day’s criminal complaints.

“They would fill the paper, they were read well online, but they didn’t feel to me like I was actually doing anything that helped people understand what was happening in the community,” Anderson said.

For the readers, Anderson believes, “It was the equivalent of just eating a giant bowl of M&Ms. You’ve consumed a lot of individual things, but you don’t walk away from it feeling full the way you might from a larger analysis piece.”

But those bigger stories can be easy to miss, said Ted Gest, Washington bureau chief for The Crime Report and president of Criminal Justice Journalists, the nation’s only association of criminal justice reporters.

Covering local municipal courts for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the 1970s, he overlooked a big one. “I completely missed what became the Ferguson story — that the local municipal courts in that area use municipal courts as cash generators and discriminate against minorities,” Gest wrote in an email, praising recent coverage of the practice by his former paper. “I do not know if the courts then were as bad as they were at the time of the Ferguson shooting in 2014, but they may have been.”

There’s good coverage of systems and trends today, said Gest, who serves as a juror for the John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Awards for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting and reads dozens of crime stories each weekday to write a crime news digest, but he’s surprised there’s not more.

“It’s a very common cliché these days among politicians to say, ‘The criminal justice system is broken.’” Gest said in an interview. “I don’t think it is, but if that’s really true, you’d think we’d be seeing lots of reporting on that.”

But reporters writing these deeper stories have to work harder to engage readers, said Pamela Colloff, who’s won awards for long-form stories on blood spatter pattern analysis and wrongful convictions. Her secret: character-driven narratives like“The Witness,” which tells the story of the death penalty through a the eyes of a woman whose job required her to observe 278 executions.

“We can write all day long about the problems in the criminal justice system, but it’s not until you get people emotionally invested in a particular person’s journey or a particular case or a particular wrongful conviction or what have you that — I believe — they’re really going to care,” Colloff said.

But those stories take time that many reporters don’t have. “I have the luxury of being able to put in the time to hopefully do things right,” Colloff said. “That doesn’t mean by any means that I always do.”

‘We should have been more skeptical’

Speaking from experience, Gest offers another critique:

“A large percent of stories you see are told totally, 100% from the police viewpoint,” Gest said. Reporters who are new on the beat or strapped for time often rely heavily on what the police tell them, but they should consult other key players like criminologists, victims’ advocates, judges, drug treatment counselors or probation officers, Gest argues.

Reporters shouldn’t treat any source as authoritative, Gest said. It’s a lesson he’s learned from experience.

He recalls one criminologist whom journalists routinely quoted in the 1990s, who said crime would keep going up — a theory that already by the early 1990s had proven false.

“I quoted him about ‘This thing is going to be out of control,’ using, if you can imagine, a graph going straight up for years… and this is a responsible guy who was testifying in Congress about this,” Gest said. “Looking back on that, we should have been more skeptical.”

‘The bullets are still flying’

Gary Fields, who spent more than two decades covering crime and criminal justice for the Washington Post and USA Today, said crime reporters often don’t give a story the time or attention it deserves.

Pressure to meet deadlines or be first on a story can push reporters to publish before they’ve got all the facts, and incomplete or inaccurate stories can harm multiple players. Outlets may have to issue corrections or retractions or fight lawsuits. Reporters may face reprimand. Innocent people may be unjustly maligned, and readers may lose confidence in journalists’ reporting.

“That early stuff’s often not accurate because they’re still trying to figure out what’s going on. We’re out here trying to get the story, and the bullets are still flying, and the shell cases are still dropping,” Fields said.

“That’s kind of a recipe for alterations in your story… You just kind of keep going and hope that this attention deficit disorder society we’re now living in doesn’t remember what you said initially.”

With the move to digital and the accompanying 24-hour news cycle, the pressure has only increased, and reporters sometimes choose being first over being right, Fields said. His advice: “Get it right first, then get it first.”

And, he said, outlets ought to stick with a story to the end. Back when he was a young reporter in Louisiana, he’d visit the Bossier Parish Jail each Sunday to copy down the arrest log.

“Unless it was some high-profile case, we never went back to say, ‘So how was this resolved?’” Fields said, so a reader would never find out whether the charges were dropped, or the case was dismissed. Looking back, Fields said, “That was a huge gap.”

Fields now believes that any journalist who names someone in an arrest is responsible for tracking the story and reporting on its resolution, since an unfinished story could lead to stigma or employment consequences for the person named. “I feel like you owe them that much,” Fields said.

‘Remember the humanity’

With the proliferation of true crime stories on Netflix and podcasts — expanding what some call the “true crime industrial complex” — Colloff worries that the already blurry lines around crime journalism are getting even harder to see.

“It’s something I think about on an almost daily basis because when you’re writing a long-form narrative, it has to be engaging and vivid and thought-provoking,” Colloff said. “How do you write narratives that fulfill that mandate without treading into exploitation or something that feels more like entertainment?”

We should “remember the humanity of everyone involved,” Colloff said, be they victims, perpetrators or anyone in between, and “always have that at the forefront of what you’re doing.”

Much crime reporting doesn’t do that, Anderson said. “It’s the news equivalent of looking at an accident when you drive by it.”

That “rubberneck coverage” can feed division and prejudice within communities, Anderson said. “It becomes a lot of like, ‘Look at that over there! I’m glad I don’t live in that neighborhood.’”

Sensational coverage can also affect whether justice is served. “If you take virtually any wrongful conviction and you spool it back to the beginning, there is very often terrible media coverage at the beginning,” Bogert said in an interview. “I just think very few people who are accused of a crime or involved in a crime come out of it feeling like the media did the right thing, and we’ve got to ask ourselves why.”

Reporting ‘close to home’

One way to promote more nuanced reporting: Hire journalists who’ve experienced the criminal justice system firsthand.

“When you’re reporting on issues that hit close to home, you know what questions to ask and can more easily see how to elevate a story because you might be aware of other angles that someone without that connection would not be aware of,” Blakinger said.

Some might argue that a reporter’s criminal history would bias her reporting, but Blakinger disagrees. “We wouldn’t question, ‘Can women cover women’s issues?’ (or) ‘Can LGBT people cover gay rights issues?’” Blakinger said. “Reporters can be fair or unfair and I don’t think it’s reasonable to make assumptions about someone’s fairness based on their past.”

Her own experience might make her more zealous about her work, she said, but that’s a good thing, just as female reporters might be more passionate about covering women’s issues and LGBT reporters might be more passionate about covering LGBT issues.

“I don’t think those are bad things,” Blakinger said, “and I don’t think it’s a bad thing if you get a criminal justice reporter with a criminal record who can come at it with more intensity than someone with no personal connections to it.”

Colloff argues this reporting is yet another example of the value of diversity in the workplace. Compared to her own early-career self, those who’ve been victims or served time would have a lot more perspective.

“It shouldn’t be unusual,” Colloff said. “I think we miss something if we don’t have more people in the mix.”

‘How does this whole equation balance out?’

Headlines like “Wolf Pack’s Prey” are — hopefully — a thing of the past, Fields said.

“I hope that there’s enough awareness of the power of language,” Fields said, citing the dehumanizing effect of terms like gang and mob. “The words can subtly do things in terms of the interpretation of your audience.

“I hope we have seen enough exonerations in my profession… for us to always keep a little air of suspicion,” Field said.

Blakinger is hopeful too. She sees journalists, including in her own Houston Chronicle newsroom, engaging in “evolving discussions” on issues like what terms to use to describe people in prison or whether it’s appropriate to publish a mugshot.

She believes these conversations, which might not have been imagined five or 10 years ago, are an ethical obligation for the profession.

“While it’s not our responsibility… to do journalism that doesn’t harm people, it should be, morally, as humans, a thing we’re thinking about,” Blakinger said. “If we’re causing harm… what is the news value and how does this whole equation balance out?”

The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism. Sign up for our quarterly newsletter here.

Despite high-profile firings and policy changes after the #MeToo movement swept through newsrooms, a subset of news professionals often remains unprotected, largely unheard from and without recourse in cases of sexual misconduct: freelance journalists.

Women are especially vulnerable to sexual harassment, unwanted romantic or physical advances and assault. “[These incidents] run the gamut,” says Elisa Lees Muñoz, executive director of the International Women’s Media Foundation, an organization that works to elevate the status of women in media.

When women report on a freelance basis – working essentially as independent contractors – “they don’t have an organization to back them up or provide any kind of resources [like] medical insurance [or] trauma support,” Lees Muñoz says. “They’re really on their own.”

As in other professions, the number of freelance journalists who experience incidents of harassment is likely far more than those who don’t. “I’ve come in contact with hundreds and hundreds of journalists in my 16 years of working with IWMF and less than a handful of them have ever said, ‘I have not experienced sexual harassment,’”  Lees Muñoz says.

She adds that the nature of freelance work can lend itself to less formal situations and problematic out-of-the-office environments.

“What I’ve heard from freelancers is that the way that you build a relationship with an editor who you’re trying to pitch is to meet them face to face,” Lees Muñoz says. “And because you’re not in the office with them, usually these meetings take place outside of work and frequently outside of work hours.”

“So [as a freelancer], I go out to meet an editor who I’m trying to pitch a story to or who I’m trying to just meet for the first time, and it’s over drinks, and then I get asked out, and then I feel like if I say ‘No’ then the next time I pitch, I’m not going to get the [story accepted] and he’s not going to reach out to me when he has a job,” Lees Muñoz says.

And in a case where harassment has occurred, the freelance journalist has to make a potentially detrimental decision – to report it or not.

Elisa Lee Muñoz

“When [a freelancer] feels that there has been sexual harassment, the contracts that they work under offer absolutely no protection whatsoever,” Lees Muñoz says, adding that the women often feel, “I need to make a choice between denouncing the harassment and my professional best interests, which are to maintain the relationship with this [news] outlet.”

The issue becomes more fraught because freelancers almost always have nowhere to turn beyond the news organization itself.

“It is so very difficult for female freelancers to make these kinds of accusations and to denounce that kind of behavior because there is no governing body, there’s no journalism union that they can appeal to,” Lees Muñoz says. “Their only recourse is to go to the employer of that editor and close the door for future employment [with that news outlet].” 

Ample room for new policies 

Anna Therese Day has experienced sexual harassment and worse. 

As a freelance reporter who has worked in dangerous conflict areas for several years, she’s had her boss-clients hit on her and make inappropriate comments about her body. In one case a few years ago, an executive producer followed her into the bathroom and put his hands on her sexually.

“I’ve experienced such a wide range of humiliating behavior,” she says. “[The] sexual harassment from bosses that I’ve had has been probably one of the most deflating and violating experiences because it’s been cumulative.” 

As each new incident occurred, a number of thoughts raced through her mind.

“When these things happen to you, particularly since you know the person [and] you see some of their redeeming qualities from day to day … you don’t realize that they’re doing this to other women, you think maybe it was an isolated scenario, you don’t want to make a big deal about it,” she explains. “It’s such a distraction and disruption from doing your job.”

As a founding member of The Frontline Freelance Register, a membership organization for freelance journalists, Day has heard a number of stories from women. 

She echoes IWMF’s Muñoz sentiments about how “freelancers kind of fall through the cracks and because of that, we’re even more vulnerable.”

But she believes it’s possible – especially given the #MeToo movement – for things to change. 

Anna Day Long

“If we’re going to finally get equality, this is the moment to do it [because] now there’s more of an openness to have these conversations and really push policy,” she says.

One thing Day would like to see is a database of sorts where women can report incidents and share what happened to them with others. 

“Nobody’s really stepped up to say they will collect stories [of harassment and assault] because nobody wants that liability,” she says. “Nobody seems to feel like they can legally absorb those kinds of complaints without encouraging women to move forward or feeling some responsibility to take legal action against the men, which women might not want to do.”

“[But] I think that’s the missing piece because we notice their patterns of behavior, we know it’s a predatory pattern,” Day says, while acknowledging the problems with lists like this in the past.

In absence of some kind of list, however, women are helping each other. “I’ve seen a lot of leadership from a lot of women journalists and a lot of it’s behind the scenes,”  she says. “A lot of it’s [women acting as] caseworkers to their friends and colleagues.”

How media organizations can help

Lees Muñoz believes the first step is to add language against sexual harassment and assault to freelancer contracts. 

“Media organizations that have taken on this issue and are grappling with how to handle it internally should definitely make sure that whatever it is that they’re developing applies to freelancers,” she says. “And that people who are on the hiring end with freelancers have really clear guidelines about how you interact with freelancers, including when you meet with them.”

“Just make sure that [freelancers] are part of your overall policies. [If] you hire freelancers, they should be included … in the contracts, talk about how one reports this [behavior] … it should be made very clear,” she continues, adding that the only media organization she’s heard of to update their freelance contracts in such a way was National Geographic following the ousting of a photo editor for sexual misconduct.

In the past, “many women just put their heads down, kept working, pretended it didn’t happen and didn’t make waves because they valued their careers,” says Lees Muñoz.

“Many, many others left the profession altogether or got pushed out because they didn’t have any recourse,” she adds.

That cannot continue. “Freelancers have been left behind [in this] conversation and any attention that can be brought to them, particularly given that the journalism enterprise is more and more relying on freelancers [is needed],” Lees Muñoz says. “If you’re not creating an environment where women can operate safely, then you’re contributing to a less diverse news media and less viewpoints and less perspectives. And so it’s really a critical issue.”

The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism. Sign up for our quarterly newsletter here.

Kate McCarthy, director of programs for the Women’s Media Center, speaks about SheSource, an online database of media-experienced women experts, to the staff of Voice of America in September 2018. Photo courtesy of the Women’s Media Center.

Journalism has a gender problem.

In 2019, according to the Women’s Media Center’s Status of Women in the U.S. Media report, men accounted for 63 percent of bylines and other credits in print, Internet, TV and wire news. The same study found that men who report on congress had nearly two times as many followers as women working the same beat.

However, the issue of underrepresentation for women in journalism extends well beyond the makeup of newsrooms — it also exists in the stories they tell.

Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, began grappling with this problem in her own stories in 2013.

“Representing women fairly and proportionally was something that I valued and thought was important, but I didn’t know if I was actually doing it. I wanted to find out,” LaFrance said.

She partnered with a graduate student at MIT to analyze 136 stories she wrote for such outlets as The Washington Post, Denver Post, Honolulu Civil Beat and other outlets across a 12-month span. The results, she declared in a 2013 Medium post about the analysis, were not good.

LaFrance found that of the nearly 2,100 people she mentioned in about 130 stories she wrote that year, just 25 percent were women. Further, 52 of those articles failed to mention women at all.

Ever since, LaFrance has consciously sought to improve these numbers. She has rooted her efforts in cultivating new relationships with “really smart women studying the things I was writing about.”

“Stories are stronger when journalists are more deliberate about looking for different perspectives,” LaFrance said. “Over a period of weeks, I made a really dedicated effort to ask people for recommendations [for women sources]. Making sure that you’re thoughtful that you have a mix of people with different backgrounds … ends up paying dividends.”

LaFrance argues, though, that diverse voices shouldn’t be included arbitrarily and that hard quotas on diversity of sources in individual stories are a bad idea.

“If you apply too rigid a framework to what we are trying to do, it doesn’t work,” LaFrance said. “There are so many editorial decisions that go into every sentence of a story, sciencing too much [making sourcing too systematic] doesn’t make sense.”

The push to equally represent women in works of journalism is also being taken on by media organizations as a whole. At the BBC, the 50:50 Challenge is an initiative that started with one program from the broadcaster and has now spread throughout the company.

The challenge is aimed at equally representing men and women across all BBC channels. Amanda Ruggeri, a senior editor and reporter with BBC Future, outlined how her team is tracking their work for the challenge.

“The way our team is counting it is in three different main ways,” Ruggeri said. “One is bylines, which is quite simple. The second is references in stories. For our purposes, that means not only who we are interviewing, but also anyone mentioned in a story, even historical figures. The third strand is pictures. Are we showing more men in pictures? Or women?”

Ruggeri said having the 50:50 Challenge at the forefront of the BBC’s reporting has made a “huge difference” in the stories they have produced.

“Not only do we believe this is the right thing to do, it is also something that makes your journalism better,” she said. “It helps us deliver fair and accurate journalism. Sometimes we’ll only catch our own bias if we speak to someone that has a different perspective than the usual, established pool of sources.”

Ruggeri also emphasized that BBC Future doesn’t seek out a woman as a source just because she is a woman, but that it strives to find the best sources and most qualified experts for every story.

Beyond news organizations, nonprofits such as the Women’s Media Center also seek to tackle the problem of underrepresentation of women in journalism. Founded in 2005, the WMC works “to raise the visibility, viability and decision-making power of women” in media and advocates to make sure women’s voices are being heard.

Part of this push is the nonprofit’s database of experts, WMC SheSource. The online tool is meant to debunk the excuse from journalists that they are incapable of finding women who are experts on a topic they are reporting on, according to Kate McCarty, who oversees WMC SheSource and is director of programs for WMC.

“With SheSource, we can find women who can talk about pretty much any issue under the sun,” McCarthy said. “Journalists saying, ‘We can’t find any women,’ is not good enough.”

WMC SheSource was originally founded by the White House Project, a different nonprofit that promoted women in government but transitioned to WMC in 2009. Since the transition, the database has grown from about 400 experts to more than 1,500.

The WMC is not alone in its mission to connect reporters with women. 500 Women Scientists, a self-described grassroots organization working to build an “inclusive scientific community,” has created its own database to connect reporters, educators and lawmakers with women scientists. Similarly, an organization called Women Also Know Stuff, has developed a database of experts who can speak about topics from African politics to nuclear weapons to terrorism.

Journalists can turn to a number of other databases as well:

• Academic Women in Public Administration
• LGBTQ Scholars Network
• People of Color Also Know Stuff
• Sourcelist
• Women in Chemistry
• Women in Machine Learning
• Women in Media
• Women in Neuroscience
• Women in Tech

Do you know about other resources we should add to this list? Please email ethics@journalism.wisc.edu with a brief description and link.

For information on the conference hosted by the Center for Journalism Ethics on “What #MeToo Means for Gender, Power & Ethical Journalism,” on April 26, see this summary.

The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism. Sign up for our quarterly newsletter here.

As #MeToo accusations mounted against a number of high-profile media figures in 2017 and 2018, organizations faced questions of how sexual harassment and assault could fester unaddressed. But for individual journalists, particularly those who cover news media, questions focused on how they could cover these cases ethically, with the right balance of truth-telling, transparency and respect for privacy.  

Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for the Washington Post and former public editor at the New York Times, said there is no set guideline for how to cover a harassment scandal once news of it breaks. According to Sullivan, quality news outlets try to be transparent and honest with their audience about what has happened within their own organization.

When it comes to weighing the need to be transparent with news audiences against the privacy of those involved, Sullivan says reporting decisions should not be driven by wanting to protect the organization’s reputation, since this isn’t a concern when reporting on another organization.

“We’re not thinking ‘Oh dear, is this going to hurt NBC’s reputation?’ No, we’re just trying to tell the truth, and we should be doing that in every case,” Sullivan said.

Yet Paul Farhi, a media reporter at the Washington Post, says that a news organization is both a news organization and a company, and that these two roles might come into conflict when it comes to a situation such as covering its own harassment scandal.

“We’re all in favor of transparency, but it’s not quite so simple, particularly when it comes to a company talking about an employee,” Farhi said. Companies also have obligations to their employees and their privacy.

Farhi, who has covered numerous harassment scandals—both at the Washington Post and within other news organizations—also says accusations do not necessarily turn into a story.

“It depends on who is involved, the circumstances of the accusations, how many accusations, how reportable it is—that is, can we get at the story to a level in which we are comfortable accurately reporting the story or fully reporting the story,” Farhi said.

According to Farhi, elements of sexual harassment and assault allegations make them particularly difficult to report. These include the specificity of the accusations, corroborating evidence (such as the accuser discussing incidents with another person) and time lapsed between incidents and accusations.

Minnesota Public Radio’s coverage of Garrison Keillor

Following Garrison Keillor’s abrupt firing from Minnesota Public Radio in November 2017, an investigative team of reporters at MPR released a story in January 2018 on sexual harassment allegations against Keillor.

The stream of reporting following the initial piece not only discussed Keillor’s alleged misconduct, but also detailed the work being done by MPR to cover up the scandal.

Eric Ringham, an arts editor at MPR, was the editor of a team of journalists covering the Garrison Keillor scandal.

“Even though it was a complication that the scandal was in-house, it was also a big part of our motivation because we had a strong sense that our readers and listeners would be interested in knowing a lot more than our employer was letting on,” Ringham said.

Ringham believes that news organizations have to be willing to treat their own the same way they have treated others.

“It was troubling to me as a journalist because I work for a company that over decades had put Garrison in the marketplace as a star, promoted his career and profited handsomely from his career and from his popularity,” Ringham said.  “To suddenly make him a non-person without any kind of a meaningful explanation as to why was doing a disservice.”

When it came to investigating the claims and reporting on Keillor, MPR’s team of journalists put themselves on the same playing field as media organizations that did not work for MPR, according to Ringham.

They did not want to use any of their insider access from working at MPR to get an advantage on the story. Instead of attending staff meetings that discussed the current state of the Keillor allegations, they avoided the meetings and interviewed their peers afterward.

Ringham admitted that there are still some strained relationships in the office following their coverage of Keillor.

“It’s a little awkward because some of them were offended—they thought we were being somehow disloyal,” Ringham said.

While MPR had attempted to hide information about the Keillor allegations from the public for some time, Ringham was gratified to see that the organization respected their investigation once the team began reporting.

“We were working with the knowledge that we at least believed there was a firewall that separated the newsroom from the business interests of MPR, and that we were independent and would be free to work independently,” Ringham said.

“I think it was an open question how firm that firewall would prove to be as this story played itself out. I’m gratified to say that the firewall held.”

NPR’s coverage of Michael Oreskes

At National Public Radio, there is a clear policy and protocol on how to cover news involving NPR in a significant way, said David Folkenflik, a media reporter at NPR and host and editor of “On Point.”

When it comes to reporting on the organization, Folkenflik said, “We want there to be a clear line. No one from executive management gets to see what we’re going to publish before it happens and, in fact, the rest of the newsroom doesn’t know what we’re going to report before it happens.”

David Folkenflik covered Michael Oreskes, the now former senior vice president of news and editorial director at NPR, when the Washington Post reported on sexual harassment allegations against him.

Folkenflik said he had previously looked into an allegation against Oreskes a year-and-a-half before the Washington Post published the first story about it in October 2017.

At that time, Folkenflik couldn’t get a source to go on record and couldn’t establish a pattern of behavior. But Oreskes was rebuked for his behavior.

After the Washington Post broke the story, NPR knew it had to be covered—not just because it was getting coverage from other organizations—but because they had reason to believe there was a pattern of behavior that had to be investigated.

“We thought we were going to own this story even though we weren’t the first ones to write a public story about it,” Folkenflik said.

Covering such an important figure at the organization added an extra level of discomfort.

“This was something that tore people up,” Folkenflik said. “It really affected the chemistry of the newsroom in a significant way.”

This was not the first time Folkenflik had covered stories of this nature. He has covered sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations at Fox News, NBC and CBS.

“It brings me no joy to do it, but then again, it’s not like it brings me any joy to write these things about other news organizations. I like news organizations,” Folkenflik said.

But he recognizes the necessity of covering these stories for the public.

“Even in a time of crisis, we are going to fulfill our mission. Even when it’s most uncomfortable for ourselves,” Folkenflik said. “These are issues that are serious and have to be exposed. There is behavior that has to be held accountable.”

Moving forward in the era of #MeToo

“It really is a different era,” Farhi said. “I think this whole #MeToo movement has created an entire set of variables that we didn’t deal with before because very few people reported on sexual harassment other than Bill O’Reilly and Fox.”

Farhi points out that the same journalistic standards should still always apply. “You try to get as much information as you can while respecting the privacy of individuals and dealing with the sensitivities of people making accusations like this,” Farhi said.

Falling back on the usual journalistic fundamentals will guide reporters, Farhi said—be fair, be accurate, be honest and be truthful about how you report.

Sullivan believes that journalists need to use the same ethical standards to report on themselves as they would on other industries.

“I’m hoping to see fairness, that you would cover yourself the way you would cover another entity, whether it’s a news organization or Congress or the Metropolitan Opera,” Sullivan said.

Folkenflik said when journalists are putting out a story about their employer, they have to dig into what happened and live their journalistic values.

“We’re major institutions, and we help people shape their views of the world. We need to get it right.”

For information on the conference hosted by the Center for Journalism Ethics on “What #MeToo Means for Gender, Power & Ethical Journalism,” on April 26, see this summary.

The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism. Sign up for our quarterly newsletter here.