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Populist times and the perils of “neutral” journalism: A Q&A with media ethicist Stephen J.A. Ward

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Stephen J.A. Ward

Stephen J. A. Ward is an internationally recognized media ethicist and the founding director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His new book, “Ethical Journalism in a Populist Age: The Democratically Engaged Journalist,”argues that a new form of journalism is needed to address the challenges that a populist age presents. The Center for Journalism Ethics spoke with Ward about what he sees as the urgent need to reexamine journalism’s approach to neutrality.

This interview had been edited for length and clarity.

 

Q: Tell us about your book.

A: The book comes out of the very existential crisis in democracy, not just in America but around the world. I had written quite a bit about dialogic democracy and other ideals, but I became increasingly dismayed and worried about what was happening around the world with far-right populist groups, people like Donald Trump, and the development of intolerance right at the heart of important democracies. Basically, the book is an attempt to say how to do journalism responsibly and democratically in a populist era where there are many forces leading us against democracy. The book starts with the premise that democracy is in trouble, that in fact journalism is part of that problem and we can’t be disengaged. I talk a lot about how journalists have to do things, be engaged and reject previous models of neutrality.

 

Q: What are some of the ethical challenges that journalists face in the populist age?

A: One of the basic problems, for journalists, is how to verify information that is washing over us from all sides and is out there on social media. There’s a verificational truth aspect to all of this, which is incredibly difficult right now and it’s only going to get worse.

The second one is how to deal with demagogues, ideologues and ideologically diverse populous, such as you have in the United States (I’m not speaking only about the U.S. but it is a very good example). What do you do as a journalist in a situation where you have a public divided and where a good deal of people simply refuse to listen to journalists simply because it does not fit their world view or their political view? And where they prefer to believe people who agitate and build up fears of other people and believe that the media are generally totally biased? Breaking through that is really a challenge. First of all, journalists, the good journalists, have to stand out from the crowd, by doing great journalism. But I think they have to do more than that. One of the problems of the public sphere is not just about fake facts. Most of the issues that are out there, that are really affecting us, are about matters of principle. Political principle: the meaning of the First Amendment, the meaning of the Second Amendment, the notion of what democracy requires of us as citizens, notions of human values, of dignity and respect for others who are not like us. These are not simply getting the facts wrong, these are matters of philosophy. Journalists have to be careful of facts, and pointing out fake facts, and I think what we have to do with journalism is dig very deeply into our culture and explain our culture to ourselves. Why do we believe in these principles? How do they apply in various circumstances? There is that interpretative element of journalism that’s more important than ever.

 

Q: Your response to the populist age is the democratically engaged journalist. What is that and how does it align with ethical journalism?

A: What I’m doing is arguing against a very old tradition, what I call the professional objective model, which basically said what a journalist does is provide unvarnished facts and just the facts in a very neutral manner. I think that model lends itself, in a time of deliberate disinformation, to manipulation. Because basically what is a fact is up for grabs, and if you’re not actively doubting what people are saying you are going to be manipulated. Secondly, you can’t simply repeat what people are saying. I don’t think that was ever right. Many people out there are saying extreme racist statements that you simply should not repeat. You want journalists these days to call liars liars, and the President is a liar. You need journalists who are engaged in the sense that they do not worry excessively about being neutral. Historically people think of objectivity as a sort of neutrality, what I’m arguing is that’s a really bad view. I’m talking about objective engagement. Journalists are engaged and advocates for what? For dialogic democracy. They have goals, let’s not pretend they don’t. Journalists are in the business of advocating for a certain type of society. How are we objective then? We’re objective not in our goals; we’re objective in our methodology.

 

Q: How do we move from the theory of democratically engaged journalism to actually practicing it in newsrooms across the country and the world?

A: I call this macro-resistance. We, as a culture and perhaps globally, have to come together in coalitions to fight the forces that are fighting against democracy and rationality. Journalists can play a part. I want to stress that it has to be journalists in league with educators, universities, schools of journalism and with all kinds of other actors out there, where we come together to create mechanisms and public processes to enforce the sort of journalism and public discourse that we want.

Within journalism, it begins with the teaching of journalism. We have to teach journalists not only skills of the latest technology, but skills in really great verification. And we also have to teach them to know something about the world, to know philosophy, the world’s history, the philosophies in the cultures, so they can be very good interpreters of the social scene. We have to deepen the mind, we need cosmopolitan students, students with very broad minds, not just technical minds.

The other thing they have to do in newsrooms is become transparent. But I think also actively helping citizens to identify where stories come from and the reliability of those stories and sources. There’s a lot of ways we can build some confidence and try to help reduce the public discern.

The other thing that’s crucial is journalists have to reposition themselves in society from being at arm’s length and being an inward-looking culture to an outward culture where we actually go out and work with people. We should be teaching society-wide programs in the schools about how media works and how we evaluate them. Journalists need to be part of that. They need to be going to schools and telling students what the difference is between a good journalist and a bad journalist, what’s the difference between a good report and propaganda. Breaking down the barriers between themselves and society, there’s just enormous work to be done there.

 

Q: You write that we need a journalism beyond facts, how can we achieve that?

A: I don’t want to come off as saying facts are not important, of course, but straight news reporting is only one of many, many types of media that the democratic public needs. The other stuff we need is great explanatory journalism. We need a re-emphasis on great investigative journalism. We need more advocacy journalism talking about where society is falling down and needs to be reformed. We need to give the citizens a chance to participate in discussions around media and media ethics. And finally, we need to create media spaces for dialogue, spaces that aren’t about great ratings but in fact where you open up the space to reasoned dialogue. There’s nothing new about this, you can see this going on already, but we need way more of that and we need it online. When we do those forms of journalism we’re leaving fact-stating behind, that’s what I mean by “beyond facts” – we’re going to be great interpreters of our culture.

 

Q: How can journalists cover hate speech and extreme speech ethically?

A: You do not always have to cover it. You have to first of all develop some policies in your newsrooms as to when you think it’s necessary to cover someone who is having a racist meeting. Not all of it is worth covering, but some of it we have to cover. Where racist people or extreme speech groups start to become politically powerful enough to capture, I hate to say this, the public’s imagination or support, you have to report on this. A lot of people say “don’t report on this at all.” Unfortunately, that’s just part of journalism. We can’t ignore this. And if you decide you’re going to cover them, it’s not like you just say, “Whatever they say we take it down, we’re neutral reporters and we just say whatever the guy said.” You have to be incredibly critical in your reports about what these people say, which means you don’t give them a free pass. Your report itself points out the dubiousness of certain claims statistically, you have to make questions of whether certain things they say are worth reporting. There are lots of coverage decisions you have to make.

You have to ask yourself the harm you’re going to cause to public order or even groups in the community by reporting on it. So, minimizing harm, attempting in any way you can to provide as much context and as much critical analysis of it. For example, you have to give the background and a sense of their importance. If they get one percent of the popular vote is it worth being at the top of the news? You have to cover some of this, but you have to do it in a critical manner.

 

Q: Looking forward, you write that we’re currently in a toxic public sphere. Do you think we can move past that?

A: I do think we can. But it’s going to have to be a huge society-wide effort and it’s going to take some time. I’ve been thinking recently – with the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the pipe bombs – that you’re going to have to admit that there are going to be a certain percentage of the population that is ideologically fixed and will never change their mind. They’re never going to listen to facts and counter perspectives. They don’t want to hear about it. I don’t think we should give up on the rest of the populous. I think there’s lots of people out there, people in the center, we have to appeal to them and hope they become politically activated. The biggest problem right now is they’re not. There’s a lot of apathy, a lot of people didn’t vote in the last [presidential] election. These people are going to have to stop saying, “Politics is bullshit, and it’s terrible and I don’t want anything to do with it,” to realize that their country demands that they do something about it.

The main thing I’m trying to say is, this is very urgent. Journalists need to rethink what they’re doing and think of ways they can push back on a lot of these forces. For me neutrality or disengagement simply is not an option, either for journalists or for ordinary citizens. I teach young people and a lot of them are so apathetic about politics. I understand why they’re so cynical. But I hope that the urgency of the situation we’re in will get through to some of the book’s readers.

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.

The ethics and future of freedom of information: a Q&A with Bill Lueders

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Bill Lueders

Disclosure: Steven Potter conducted this interview for the Center for Journalism Ethics and later was invited to join the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council board.

 

Access to government records, data and meetings is critical to good watchdog journalism.

But that access isn’t always guaranteed.

At times, reporters — as well as everyday citizens — must fight to keep access to such information and meetings as open as possible.

For 40 years, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council has been doing just that, seeking to “safeguard access to information that citizens must have to act responsibly in a free and democratic society.”

WisFOIC president and longtime journalist Bill Lueders discussed the importance of open government and ethical concerns involving information access with Center for Journalism Ethics senior fellow Steven Potter.

 

The Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council is celebrating 40 years — what was the impetus behind its creation in 1978?

The idea was that the press needed a group to protect First Amendment and media access rights. Over time, the mission of the group has shifted a bit toward dealing with access issues and for a larger constituency than just media.

 

How do journalism ethics factor into open access to government information and meetings?

It is our ethical obligation as journalists to get to the truth. Documents and meeting access are key avenues toward that end. [Information] helps us verify what we report and it helps us source it appropriately.

Also, it’s important to note that the [Society of Professional Journalists] code of ethics specifically states that journalists have an obligation to advocate for access to public information.

 

Are there other ethical dilemmas journalists face when obtaining records and access?

Yes. There is a separate ethical obligation on the part of the media to make responsible judgments about what they report, which is independent from the issue of what they are allowed to see.

Most reporters have come across information that we decided was not something we felt comfortable using for a story. Even though it may have been scintillating, [the information] wasn’t illuminating or it may be a bit invasive or unfair.

Years ago, I came across a police report about a domestic situation involving a local person. It was just sad and heartbreaking and lurid. I didn’t see that the news value justified the amount of embarrassment it would cause to this individual and his family. Sure, I was able to get the police report with no redactions and I had no doubt about the accuracy [but] it just didn’t seem to be the right thing to run a story about what happened in their house that night. It was a part of that family’s private life.

You don’t use information that can cause unnecessary hurt.

 

How have advancements in technology changed the work WisFOIC does?

Advancements in technology have changed everything; the open meetings and open records laws were both passed in the 1980s, well before the advent of PCs and the Internet, and records production and management is now largely electronic. But while the laws could use a few updates, they have held up remarkably well. That’s because they essentially affirm an ideal — that citizens in a democracy are entitled to a maximum amount of public information.

 

Many records are public, but not all are. What should a journalist do if a government agency mistakenly releases information it shouldn’t?

It can and does happen that authorities mistakenly release information. One example were botched efforts at redaction in the Wisconsin John Doe probe. The information was reported, as I believe it should be. Another example was a recent Wisconsin State Journal story that named a security guard involved in a fatal shooting; his name was not successfully redacted, and the paper was able to confirm his identity through other means. And I recently heard of a case in which authorities botched what I believe to be an improper attempt to black out a serious allegation of employee misconduct from a report. I hope the reporter uses it, as this should not have been blacked out. But I do believe most media would not publish information that they believed would put people at unnecessary risk.

 

Government officials must also follow ethical guidelines in responding to public records requests and open meetings laws. What should we expect from them in response to our requests and following open meetings laws?

I expect all government officials to respect the right of the public to obtain information about what they do, and to be as transparent as possible. I believe it is in their own best interest to do so, as public officials usually behave in responsible ways.

 

What should journalists — and citizens — do if government officials are denying the release of public records or aren’t following open meetings laws?

If they fail to provide information, my advice is always to fight. Ask for reconsideration, seek outside support, publish any refusal to release info, sue if necessary.

 

What future challenges, difficulties or hurdles do you see for journalists and citizens in regards to public records and open meetings laws?

In the future I expect to see more of what we have seen in the past: continual, small efforts to chip away at records access. In recent years, we have seen the state restrict records access to inmates, remove data from websites, eliminate the requirement that donors to campaigns identify where they work, and exempt most UW officials from financial disclosure rules. In the future, we could see new efforts to restrict access to records about university research, further efforts to curtail access to online court records, and a new push to let lawmakers shield records regarding the creation of law and policy, as well as to shield the names of people, lobbyists included, who contact them.

 

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.

Playing it straight in polarized times: A Q&A with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Craig Gilbert

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Craig Gilbert – Washington Bureau Chief, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

In less than a month, a highly divided American electorate will head to the polls for the U.S. midterm elections. Craig Gilbert, Washington Bureau Chief for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, has covered every presidential election since 1988 and written extensively about the significant partisan divide now separating Republicans and Democrats. The Center for Journalism Ethics recently spoke with Gilbert about the ethical challenges of covering politics and the upcoming midterm elections.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

You’ve covered numerous presidential campaigns, midterm elections and everything in between. What do you think the biggest shift has been in politics from when you first started covering them to today?

The biggest shift has certainly been the level of partisan division and the disappearance of political differences within parties, as the parties grow more homogenous internally, and they grow farther apart. I don’t know if that’s the biggest change, but that’s one that comes to mind. For example, in Wisconsin, you had some Republicans that were more liberal than Democrats. And some Democrats that were more conservative than some Republicans. You had people with different views, for example, on an issue like abortion within each party. So you had Democratic congressmen who were pro-life on abortion, and you had voters who were in one party routinely crossing over to vote for candidates in the other party. It was more unpredictable in many ways and took a bit of heat out of partisan conflicts. And so that’s been a massive change in our politics.

 

How do you think reporters have adapted to this new, hyper-polarized political climate?

I think it has made it more challenging to talk to people across that divide. And it’s not just true of journalism, but of lots of institutions. There’s always been an element of that, and there’s always been perceptions of bias, there’s always been partisan push back on journalism. But to the degree that you have people organizing in these camps, then you have more people seeing stories through a partisan filter. In many cases, on the same story, you’ll get flack from people on both sides because they’re reading the story differently. So the challenge is finding a way to write your stories that doesn’t pull any punches but can be read by both sides as straightforward. That’s always part of your job as a journalist, to try to see things from multiple sides, and try to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and imagine how they might be perceiving an issue. But I think that task is even more important today, because you have to do all the things you’ve always done as a journalist, in terms of pursuing the truth, but you have to be careful to play it straight and be dispassionate as well.

 

So the most important thing for reporters to do is tell it how it is?

Absolutely, you have to be true to the fundamentals. When I say play it straight, I mean use simple, factual language. You don’t have to load up your stories with a lot of modifiers. You just need to tell it like it is. A lot of it is the way you tell those stories, and I think it actually enhances the credibility of your writing, the more restrained you are in your language. I think a lot of it is kind of the way you communicate, not just the substance of what you’re communicating in the story.

 

What are some best practices for reporters when using anonymous sources in stories?

We’re pretty conservative about that [at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]. I’m very conservative about that. A lot of times people use anonymous sources when it’s not that hard to get somebody on the record. One of the problems in Washington is that it’s become somewhat routine, as an example, for staff members on Capitol Hill to ask to never be quoted. Which is fine, but one option is just to say, “If you want to be part of this story, and want to express your point of view, you have to go on the record. Or if you don’t want to go on the record, then your boss has to go on the record.”

So it’s very rare that you are actually in a situation where you’re faced with an actual choice between having a vital piece of information where the source won’t go on the record and having to decide whether or not to use it. Now, I’m talking about the kind of reporting I do. I think it’s probably different for White House reporters. I’m not a White House reporter. It may be different for some kind of quasi-investigative, Washington reporting. Look at the kind of stuff Bob Woodward does. Obviously, he uses a different set of rules when it comes to that, but most of the time in the reporting I do – political reporting, congressional reporting – there’s just no reason you need to do it. If somebody doesn’t want to go on the record, fine. But a lot of times when people want to go off the record, it’s just to say things that are very scripted anyway. So what’s the point?

 

In early September The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed written by someone in the Trump Administration. What are the ethics surrounding this kind of piece?

I think the biggest problem with a story like that is you’re asking everybody to trust you. And that’s certainly not the way we would normally operate. You want to operate with transparency. So [through publishing the piece], you’re saying, “You’re going to have to trust us about everything.” And I’m not questioning them or doubting them, but you’re saying to your readers, “You have to trust us.” A lot of the speculation is about how prominent is this person? And that’s a huge thing. If it turns out it was, and I don’t think it is, Mike Pence, that would be a very different thing than if it’s an undersecretary of state. Or if it’s the chief of staff, that would be a very different thing than if it were somebody at a lower staff level. That’s huge. And we don’t know. So they’re saying, “Trust us that this is a ‘senior official,'” but we don’t know what senior means. That’s one big set of concerns.

 

Finally, let’s transition to a topic that you, especially in your Wisconsin Voter blog, spend a lot of time on: polls. What are some things that reporters need to keep in mind when citing polls, given that they can sometimes be misleading?

I think polls are generally valid instruments. It’s how you use them. It’s just like anything else, any other piece of data. Take, for example, sports statistics. They can be totally misunderstood, they can be completely misread and misused and used selectively, it’s all about how you use them. I just think it’s so important that when you’re writing about polling that A, you consider the data and where it’s coming from. And you have to have faith in the in the survey data that you’re using. And B, you never want to put too much faith in a single poll or single data point. You just have to have some basic statistical understanding so you’re not writing a whole story based on a finding from a sample of 50 people.

When I write about polls, I try to check them in lots of different ways. I try not to get too hung up on one data point. I try not to get too hung up on the horse race part of the polls. I’m more interested in the trends in public opinion and finding the patterns behind the polls. I try, when I’m looking at one really interesting result, to go back and see if there’s evidence for that in polls by other pollsters, or in previous polls by the same pollster. If I’m trying to drill down in any detail I’ll aggregate a lot of polls so that I have a more reliable set of data to trust. It’s all about how you use polls.

Training provides resources and guidance before midterm elections

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Photo: Tom Arthur from Orange, CA, United States (vote for better tape) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Personal security, misinformation, ethical questions and data protection are all key issues facing journalists during election season. With the U.S. midterm elections a month away, the Society for Professional Journalists and Google News Initiative co-sponsored a free training on Oct. 4 in Madison on covering and protecting elections.

Led by Andy Boyle, Dan Petty and Kathleen Bartzen Culver, all experts in their respective fields, the training covered data journalism, safety and security, verification and fact checking, and ethics and elections. Below are some of the best resources and tips from the training.

Data Journalism

Andy Boyle, director of platform architecture at Axios, covered a number of different tools and resources that journalists can use to find, clean and use data.

According to Boyle, Google Trends is among the best places to find data. Trends can show you what terms and topics have been most searched for at a given time. You can break the data down by country, state and even county. Trends also has a page dedicated to the midterm elections where you can find a variety of information related to the upcoming election.

To create visual graphics with data, Boyle recommended using Tilegram, Flourish and Google Sheets. For data directly related to elections, Boyle suggested visiting Electionland or ProPublica’s Election DataBot.

Safety and Security

Dan Petty, director of audience development for Digital First Media, had one major takeaway in his section on safety and security: use two-factor authentication.

Two-factor authentication is a method used to confirm a user’s identity by asking for a second form of verification. After submitting a password, you are asked to submit some other information, such as a code sent to you via text, to confirm your identity.

Petty also provided tips for creating strong passwords. He suggested moving away from using a password and instead using a passphrase. A passphrase is generally longer than a password and consists of a series of words. For added security, Petty suggested changing your passphrase every four months, making it a minimum of 16 characters and using nonsensical phrases.

You can find more information on protecting your information at https://protectyourelection.withgoogle.com/intl/en

Verification and Fact Checking

When news breaks or a big story is taking place, false images and information pop up all over the Internet and social media, posing challenges for journalists covering a story.

One method to avoid misinformation is to use a reverse image search. This tool allows you to see whether an image circulating on the Internet has been used before and can help you track down the original image.

To find reliable information, Boyle suggested using Google Scholar, which provides scholarly literature and case law. And to find a diverse range of sources, Boyle recommended using Advanced Search on Google, which allows you to search by file type or website type.

Ethics and Elections

Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which co-sponsored the event, offered a number of tips for journalists on how to remain ethical while covering elections.

Culver reiterated that journalism’s role is to serve voters and democracy, while noting that election season can present journalists with a number of minefields. To avoid those minefields, Culver suggested:

  • not overplaying the polls
  • avoiding poorly constituted voter focus groups
  • using confidential sources only if absolutely necessary
  • staying away from last-minute revelations
  • establishing a clear line between news and opinion

Culver also recommended heeding your “inner alarm bell” when reporting on a story, asking yourself:

  • What public interest is being served by this reporting?
  • Am I missing an important point of view?
  • Will I be able to clearly and honestly explain – without rationalizing – my decision to anyone who challenges it?

Answering these questions can improve the quality of your reporting. When in doubt on an ethical question, the Society for Professional Journalists’ Ethics Hotline also offers journalists coaching from ethics committee members schooled in the Society’s Code of Ethics.

For more information on all topics from the training, and to find courses, tools and resources visit https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/training/.

 

Panel to discuss midterm elections and journalism ethics

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Panel to discuss midterm elections and journalism ethics

Madison, Wis. – The Center for Journalism Ethics will facilitate a discussion on “Media after the Midterms: Journalism Ethics in a Contentious Age” at a free public event at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 7, at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison. Three panelists with expertise in media, political reporting and the news industry will engage in a public discussion about journalism ethics and the special challenges of covering politics in highly polarized times.

The panelists are:

  • David Folkenflik, the New York City-based media correspondent for NPR News and the host and editor of On Point from NPR and WBUR. Folkenflik is an award-winning reporter who writes about the figures who shape journalism and the tectonic shifts affecting the news industry.
  • Jessie Opoien, a reporter at the Capital Times since 2013, covers state government and politics, as well as Madison life, race relations, culture and music.
  • Dhavan Shah is the Maier-Bascom Professor in UW–Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and director of the Mass Communication Research Center. He researches the influence of electronic and digital media on social judgments and civic engagement.   

Kathleen Bartzen Culver, James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics and director of the Center, will moderate the conversation, which will address topics such as declining media trust, changing business models, social media, how partisanship affects both journalists and news consumers, as well as what the future might hold for ethical journalism.

“Our country is more politically polarized than we have seen in our lifetimes,” Culver said. “Journalists face ethical challenges in how to cover political issues while under partisan attack, as well as critical questions about how we have lost public trust and how to regain it.”

The event is free and open to the public. The panel will be in the Promenade Room at the Overture Center for the Arts, 201 State Street, Madison.

Folkenflik will be visiting the Center for Journalism Ethics the week of Nov. 5 as part of the Center’s journalist in residence program, an initiative now in its third year. The program brings renowned journalists to campus to promote engagement with UW–Madison students and the public.

The Center for Journalism Ethics, housed in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the UW-Madison, provides an international hub for the examination of the role of professional and personal ethics in the pursuit of fair, accurate and principled journalism. Founded in 2008, the Center offers resources for journalists, educators, students and the public, including internationally recognized annual conferences exploring key issues in journalism.

For information, contact Krista Eastman, Center for Journalism Ethics administrator, at krista.eastman@wisc.edu.

Audio: Amber Hunt and the ethics of the Aftermath podcast

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Amber Hunt, Cincinnati Enquirer

Over two decades of reporting, Amber Hunt has covered a lot of crime.

In that time, she’s reported on a number of shootings, the conflicts that proceeded them and the prosecutions that came after. But rarely has she been able to follow up and see how life has progressed for the victims of gun violence she’d written about. That led her to wonder, ‘what’s life like for gunshot survivors?’ and ‘how have they coped with the trauma of being shot?’

To answer those questions, she teamed up with the non-profit news organization The Trace to create ‘Aftermath: A Podcast About Gun Violence Survivors,’ which began in May and ran for eight episodes.

For journalists covering gun violence, there are a number of ethical landmines to consider. Hunt, a reporter for The Cincinnati Enquirer, discussed how she navigated these ethical issues with Center for Journalism Ethics senior fellow Steven Potter.

Listen to the audio story here.

Needed: Empathy and an open mind; Religion reporters face unique challenges

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Manya Brachear Pashman (left) of the Chicago Tribune, and (right) Bob Smietana of Facts & Trends.

Religion is a topic of conversation many choose to avoid, especially when talking with people they don’t know.

Religion reporters, however, must do just the opposite.

As they dive into different cultures and broach highly sensitive subjects with complete strangers, they face a number of unique ethical challenges.

The primary goal of religion reporting, says Manya Brachear Pashman, who’s been the Chicago Tribune’s religion reporter for 15 years, “is to teach people about religions they may not be exposed to.”

To do that within an ethical framework, journalists must keep a few things in mind.

“The big one, of course, is being able to put your own religious beliefs aside in order to cover other religions, to keep an open mind and not let your own beliefs get in the way or influence what you’re writing about,” Brachear Pashman says. “We’re professionals for a reason, [so] we set aside our own personal beliefs to cover things objectively.”

Being a religious person may confer some advantages in religion reporting, whether journalists are covering their own religion or someone else’s. “Religious people do things that are hard to explain sometimes, but if you’re religious yourself, you just have a little bit more of a grasp of why,” she adds.

Another challenge is that the subjectivity of religion may require a reporter to talk to more sources than usual to understand a particular tradition or event.

“If you want to know what a particular ritual means, you better ask more than one person … it can be a very personal, very personal thing, so you want to be sure to talk to multiple clergy, multiple teachers, multiple practitioners and believers of the faith,” says Brachear Pashman, who is also the current president of the Religion News Association. “Understand going in that religion is not homogenous. No religious tradition is homogeneous homogeneous — there’s a spectrum of belief in every tradition.”

And, she adds, reporters must be there for major events. “Being present for those ritual moments is very important. I always advise writers to include a ritual moment or a teaching moment in every story because that brands the story. It tells the reader, ‘This is a religion story; this is what’s going on here for these people.’ That’s an important signal to send to readers,” she says.

Emphasizing that it’s difficult to report religion stories by telephone, Brachear Pashman says,  “We’re not talking about casting a vote at the ballot box or going to a town hall meeting. We’re talking about a transcendent moment for these people. That scene is packed with meaning.”

Access to information is also a unique challenge, says Bob Smietana, who has covered religion for secular and religious media outlets since 1999 and is currently a senior writer with Facts & Trends, a quarterly Christian magazine.

“If I’m covering city council or a school system, everything is public record. But religious groups in general, don’t have to make anything public,” he explains. “So you have to have a respectful relationship with them and that they trust you, because everything you get is voluntary.”

Smietana, who is a former Religion News Association president, also warns about taking things like scripture verses literally. Instead, he says, ask sources to explain them in common, contemporary language. “When they’re talking to an insider audience [of believers], they all know what they mean,  so ask them what they mean. Otherwise, you can misinterpret things,” he says. “You want to get people to explain their beliefs — and even their titles, whether it’s minister or pastor or elder or preacher — in their own words.”

Reporters must also keep things relative. As one example, Smietana points to the time he covered a group of cat worshippers. “Worshipping cats may sound weird at first but then, just think about some of the stories in the Bible — God talking to a burning bush, walking on water, etc. — those things sound weird too, if you’re an outsider,” he says.

A great place to start, Smietana advises, is with consideration, empathy and a simple question: “How did these people begin believing these things and what do they mean by them?”

One final challenge to keep in mind is news judgment.

“How you decide what is and isn’t a story is also an ethical consideration,” he says. “What’s the difference between just what’s an internal dispute in a house of worship and a news story?”

Smietana says that, with these things in mind, religion reporters can fulfill the most important ethical principle, “to report as concisely and accurately and fairly as possible.”

Climate change reporting is (slowly) increasing awareness

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Reporting on Justin Gillis’s keynote address at the 2018 “Division, Denial & Journalism Ethics” conference at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In recent years, Justin Gillis, former lead writer on climate science at The New York Times and a current contributing opinion writer for the newspaper, has seen an increased awareness in the American public about climate change.

Gillis says that this added awareness is a function of two factors: an increase in the amount of journalism on the topic, and simple, daily observation.

“People are trying to figure out why things are changing in my backyard, and then they’re seeing this journalism that explains it,” he said. “[Journalism’s] slowly working, it’s just that the problem is urgent.”

Justin Gillis in conversation with Katy Culver at the 2018 Center for Journalism Ethics conference.

Speaking in late-April at the Center for Journalism Ethics’ “Division, Denial and Journalism Ethics,” conference, Gillis discussed some of the challenges that science journalists have in explaining complex concepts to the American public.

Topics are often highly nuanced and difficult to explain to an average reader. Debates over sources of information can also further complicate discussions. Gillis seeks to cover science fairly and says that false balance (equating a position with a large swath of evidence with a position with far less evidence) has historically been a problem in coverage of the environment.

But it’s one part of the profession he sees as improving.

“This is less and less of a problem now in American journalism, at least on climate,” Gillis added.

Gillis discussed how changes in the climate are very real and that those who say that there is no such thing as climate change are “just crazy.”

“We’re in a very deep hole and we’re digging it deeper,” he said.

Climate denial is largely an Anglophone concept, or prevalent in English speaking counties, Gillis said, citing research by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford. But Gillis doesn’t see climate denial as a major factor in overseas stories. Gillis says that climate denial is “just not part of the journalism” in England, as the “conservative party is just as committed as the labor party to climate action.”

In Germany, Gillis noted that much of the coverage on climate denial is mostly about the “bizarre Americans,” and why those in the United States are preventing major measures to curtail climate change.

Still, despite some challenges, Gillis sees examples of science journalism making a difference in people’s daily lives. Referring to a story he worked on about the importance of LED light bulbs and various others means to improve energy consumption, Gillis said, “I think the story that we did on the front page of The Times ten years ago helped to push that trend forward.”

Investigative journalism and infrastructure failures: A Q&A with Brant Houston

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A pedestrian bridge on Florida International University’s campus collapsed March 15, 2018, killing nine people and injuring six more. Brant Houston, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois, has more than two decades of experience as an investigative reporting and has covered many similar incidents. The Center for Journalism Ethics talked with Houston about the ethical challenges of covering such incidents and about the current state of investigative journalism at-large.

 

Can journalism outlets and more specifically investigative reporting units continue to devote resources to some of these infrastructure related stories before problems occur or do the lack of resources lead to them being more reactionary in their coverage?

Well there are newsrooms that do these before hand, say a single thing like a pedestrian bridge maybe not, but one thing that is typically done across the country is news organizations is looking at bridge inspection. Oddly enough, pedestrian bridges don’t fall under the Department of Transportation rules and so pedestrian bridges are pretty much left up to municipalities. But in any case, newsrooms are doing stories before hand. One of the greatest examples was the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which four years before Hurricane Katrina did a five-part series on the devastation that would hit New Orleans if a major hurricane landed. So that’s probably one of the best examples I ever saw of investigative reporters and editors being proactive and we actually put that on the front of our web page showing an attempt of a newsroom to give a warning. There are stories that are done ahead of time and bridge inspection ones seem the best. Now, certainly, you saw a lot more of those stories after a Minneapolis-St. Paul bridge collapse where everybody is looking at their bridges and the same thing in Seattle. I think people tend to forget the stories done beforehand. They remember the stories done after, but seldom to do they remember right away: “We were warned about that.”

 

Is it difficult to allocate those resources to infrastructure projects as sometimes in inspecting them, there are no problems to be found?

I think it’s tougher for what would have been the traditional print newsroom. I think there’s no question about that. We probably lost 60 percent or more of the editorial staff, at least in the U.S. and that’s just a fact that you can’t always do more with less. I do think that the smaller newsroom and even the greatly reduced newsrooms can do more with accountability because of the increasing sophistication when it comes to using data. So, for example, there’s no way a newsroom now could really do what it could do on bridges if there wasn’t a national bridge inventory, which is a database of all the bridges in the United States. And, in addition, states have them and the other thing that’s happened, at least since 2001, a lot of the databases that were taken down on national infrastructure have gone back up. Not enough, but they have gone back up. So for example, there is the national dam inventory and even when they took that down after 9/11 you could still use it because dams don’t move unless they collapse so a lot of the data was still good.

 

How else do you think data has changed investigative reporting?

One way is that you can go through tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of documents very quickly. And with even a rudimentary look at things whether in Pivot Table in Excel or a query in a database manager, you can quickly see patterns and outliers. And that used to take days and weeks – really weeks and months – and that can be done once you have the skills within a couple of hours, so that changes things. Second of all, you have so much more credibility that used to be way back then you couldn’t look through all the documents, say 10,000 documents, you could look at 200 randomly or do a spot check. Now you say, “We looked at the whole population of documents, this is what they say.” You can also say, “You’re making policy on these documents, but you know what, we looked at them and they’re flawed. So how can you make reasonable policy when you’re working with flawed data.” So that takes you to a whole new level of investigative reporting. You now have the ability to do profound stories that you couldn’t do before and certainly you couldn’t do now unless you had those skills.

 

How has social media changed investigative reporting?

I think we’re continuing to develop the best ways to analyze social media, but one of the great examples was a few years ago at The Guardian in which it looked at where the rioters and race riots they had in several major cities were coming from and how they communicated. We couldn’t have done that without access to social media and without the tools to see those kinds of patterns. So that’s changed too.

We’ve also had the ability to crowdsource. So although there is some unreliability with crowdsourcing you’re at least getting a much broader section of comments then you would have if you were just walking down the street.

 

What are the biggest ethical challenges of the crowdsourcing method?

I think you can get tips from social media, but I think the credibility of who’s sending you them – as we all know from the rise of the bots – the credibility of those folks is a challenge. Now, on the other hand, if you find that there is a lot going on that doesn’t have credibility that it’s bots or it’s trolls, then there you have another story. But you do have to look at the credibility of them.

There are always the three pillars of reporting. Those are data documents, interviewing real people with real people and then there is observation, that’s getting out in the field. So for example, on bridge data, it’s incredibly important that journalists talk to experts and inspectors and so fourth, but they also should go out and look at some of the bridges that are supposed to be so bad. So if you’re doing all three, you have a much better chance at being credible and trustworthy and getting the story right.

 

Can citizens seek these records out? Can they have some role in investigating these potential infrastructure shortcomings?

I think that more and more of that has happened. The challenge that people have is a lot of people say, “anyone can be a citizen journalist.” Well, anyone who has gotten training or on the job training or education training knows that there are a lot of things you have to learn to be a credible reporter, but there’s no question that someone steeped in data analysis can  get on the web, see some open government information and do some basic analysis and point out some basic problems or issues. Again, there’s some folks that say, I’ll do some quick analysis, I’ll do some visualization, I’ll throw it up on the web. If you throw it up there without some kind of explanation and some kind of understanding, it’s interesting but it doesn’t necessarily always attract attention or doesn’t get even understanding from an audience.

Years ago, Adrian Holovaty and his team at Everyblock, (a neighborhood news and discussion site) did some great work in terms of visualizing data, but they didn’t check it out in terms of what journalists did. They ended visualizing crime data in Los Angeles a few years ago, and the data had some serious flaws. It put crimes in locations which crimes never occurred and if they had looked at where some of those crimes were clustered there’s no way they could have occurred there and the Los Angeles Times did a very nice job when it analyzed the data and also did a nice, wide interview with Adrian Holovaty on the importance of checking the integrity of data.

And so, a number of programmers have said that when they switch to becoming journalists, they are surprised that you really need to get it right on the first try because they’re used to going through several versions of software until they get it right.

 

In general, what are some of the biggest challenges you think investigative reporters face? Or similarly, what do challenges newsrooms face when dealing with investigative reporting?

Time. It’s always been time. Investigative reporting often requires more time. Time is money. Time is taken away from other potential stories. It’s riskier in that you don’t know what your result is. If you’re doing it in certain countries, it’s risky to your health and well-being in life.

There are a series of risks, the first risk being that you’re going to spend time on something and not come back with something. Investigative reporting in some ways is the research and development arm of journalism. So there’s a risk of not coming back with something and then there’s a risk of being threatened, crossing funders or advertisers and there’s the risk of having the people you’re reporting on come after you either verbally, physically, and these days electronically. There are a number of journalists in the U.S. that have trolls coming after them all the time.

 

Are there certain ethical concerns investigative reporters face when they go out in the field?

The stakes are usually higher, so that the ethical concerns are typical to that of a doctor, so first of all, do no harm or minimize harm. So I believe there are ethical challenges almost daily in investigative reporting. If this comes out how will it impact this person or this institution? Are you hearing the other sides of a story thoroughly enough. Just by making a phone call can you expose somebody to attack or ridicule. You’re trying to make sure you’re taking care of people while you’re doing this in the proper way. And possibly if you have a story that could result in the resignation or the loss of a job of someone that’s high impact. So you better think about ethics everyday.

 

From the perspective of a professor, when teaching students about investigative journalism, how do you break the mold and show them that investigative journalism is not all the glamour that movies like Spotlight or All the President’s Men make them out to be?

I think you learn by doing. And I think Spotlight and even All the President’s Men did show some of the challenging drudgery of doing investigative reporting. But I think the romance of, “Oh I made a couple of calls and now I have a great story,” disappears very quickly after you’ve had to spend the equivalent of a day looking through data or documents. You realize it’s the excitement or interest in looking at content or talking to people that keeps you going. So I teach it by people working on stories. I had a class in which two students had to keep going back to the department of environmental education in Illinois and the data was incomplete and then it was incomplete again. The bloom is off the romance after about the third time you have to go back and you’re still getting incomplete information.

 

What are the basics you first emphasize with students who are learning about investigative reporting?

Well there’s one that the great team of Don Barlett and Jim Steele had which was getting in a document state of mind. I think journalists are used to doing interviews. Even though you have to practice and get better at them, they’re used to doing interviews. They’re used to walking down that road, going out and interviewing people, getting out into the field or getting people on email. But to actually say, “I want to find a document that either supports, contradicts or gives some nuance to what somebody just said,” or will give that to somebody you will interview in the future, I think that takes some practice, getting in that document state of mind.

The other thing I would mention is that taking on investigative reporting class doesn’t mean you’ll become an investigative reporter. It does ensure that you’ll be a much better reporter and if you’re editing the stories, you’ll have to become a much better editor. So one of the reasons that investigative reporters in the global investigative network are so popular is that by taking their training you get skills that you can use in everyday and weekly and monthly reporting. That’s something else I also emphasize. You may not want to do the long-term project that results in a series of stories or one big story, but you know whatever story you touch after you get these skills is better.

 

What skills are most important?

Data. The ability to seek out data and documents. The fact that you should improve your interviewing techniques, I think it improves your preparation for interviews. It’s as basic as not asking somebody how to spell their name, but asking them to confirm the spelling that you’ve got the spelling right.

The one other thing I want to mention more than ever is the need for thoroughness and the need for accuracy and the need for transparency, especially, if there’s some uncertainty in what you have in your data or in your interviews. I think some reporters are worried about having uncertainty in there reporting and I think investigative reporting training will give a reporter the confidence to say, “This is as much as we know.”