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Eric Carvin, social media editor Associated Press

With just a couple clicks, an erroneous tweet can evaporate.

If you spell a restaurant’s name wrong or quote a song lyric incorrectly on your personal account, it’s easy to quickly wash that bad tweet away and start again — no big deal.

News organizations and journalists tweeting on the job, however, don’t have that luxury.

Instead, editors say that news media must approach Twitter with the same ethical and accountability standards as anything else they produce. And that means owning — and promptly correcting — errors.

For Cassandra Garrison, social media and live-news editor at Thomson Reuters, correcting bad tweets is about transparency.

Cassandra Garrison, Thompson Reuters

“We feel strongly that we must correct ourselves quickly and openly, when it needs to be done,” she said. “We don’t believe that an incorrect tweet should just be deleted without any further comment. To us, that would be a lack of accountability.”

Eric Carvin, social media editor for Associated Press, agreed. “We need to make sure that when a mistake is made that it’s corrected and there’s transparency,” he said.

All of this is important, Garrison and Carvin contend, because Twitter has become a powerful resource for news outlets to push out their stories and break news.

“In the last 10 years, [Twitter] has really taken off as a consistent place for people to turn in urgent situations when they are in need of instant info,” Garrison said. “This makes it a perfect place for journalists and news orgs to have a space to communicate with their followers. It’s also when we see our biggest spikes on Reuters accounts — in times of breaking news when we are fastest with the information.”

Carvin said Twitter is a fast and immediate way to reach news audiences.

“Social [media] is a direct-to-customer experience,” he said.

At Reuters, Garrison said the Procedure is multi-layered.

“[We] issue another tweet announcing the correction [and] send it in the format which quotes the incorrect tweet so our followers can see what we are correcting for context. [Then, we] issue another tweet, this time quoting the correction, with the language: ‘Please see our correction. We will be deleting our incorrect tweet,’” she said.

“A few minutes later, we delete the original incorrect tweet. We will [retweet] the correction on all accounts that the incorrect tweet was shared through. This has been the most efficient way we have found to deal with corrections in the fast-moving world of Twitter.”

AP has a similar policy.

After the call is made by editors to correct a tweet, “we delete the tweet and immediately follow up with another tweet that explains that we deleted the earlier one and why,” Carvin said.

“And that notes that, in most cases, the replacement tweet is coming — and the wording of that is carefully approved internally. Then, we immediately follow up with the replacement tweet which does what the first tweet should have done.”

Just like with news stories, Twitter corrections can run the gamut from errors in quotes and incorrect figures to location clarifications and mislabeled photo attributions.

And that’s why Twitter corrections are handled with the same importance as any other correction.

“When we make a mistake, we must own it. We would do damage to our reputation if we were to cover our errors and not acknowledge them,” Garrison said. “In a climate where the media is constantly under the microscope, it is more important than ever to be transparent, especially on social media where millions of people around the world connect with our news instantly.”

“Accuracy is our bread and butter,” Carvin said. “We want people to walk away with the right information.”

Sue Robinson

Sue Robinson has navigated media ethics in a couple of different ways.

First, as a reporter for more than a decade and now as a UW-Madison journalism professor researching how journalists use new communication technologies to report on public affairs, she’s encountered quite a few unique ethical issues. And now, she’s working to find solutions.

To that end, her first book, “Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power & Privilege Shape Progressive Communities” will be released Oct. 30 (available for pre-order here). The book examines how digital platforms enable and constrain citizens – especially those in marginalized communities – who produce and share information in the public sphere about racial achievement disparities in the K-12 education system.

More specifically, her years-long research for the book includes “drawing on network analysis of community dialogues, interviews with journalists, politicians, activists, and citizens and deep case study of five cities” to examine “the institutional, cultural, and other problematic realities of amplifying voices of all people while also recommending strategies to move forward and build trust.”

 Robinson sat down to talk about media ethics and the book:

Q: What comes to mind when you consider journalism ethics?

I spend a lot of time thinking about objectivity. When you talk about objectivity, you’re talking about a main pillar of ethics. So, I spend a lot of time deconstructing what that means. [UW-Madison Prof.] Katy Culver and I wrote a piece (“When White reporters cover race: News media, objectivity and community (dis)trust”) that came out recently [that] was basically suggesting that we re-approach what we mean by ‘objectivity’ and re-think the ethical parameters of we put in place in newsrooms.

[For instance,] the whole idea that you treat everyone the same [and] as coming from the same background and having the same understandings of how information exchange happens in public spaces is unethical. So, when I talk about journalism ethics, I try to problematize that – I think about how we’ve thought about it traditionally and how is that problematic in real life.

One of the things [journalists] talk about is holding people accountable for the things they say by using their name. And so, when people don’t give their name, they can’t be credible. So, [the journalist] may use that person’s information as background, but their voice doesn’t get heard because they’re not willing to put themselves out there [by providing their name]. My argument is that not everyone can put themselves out there in the same way [because] there are power dynamics that are happening that are very real for these people, even if it means that it’s not necessarily life-threatening or freedom-threatening. There are some very real cultural, political and economical repercussions for whole groups of people and that we might reconsider how we document those voices.

[For instance], if you’re talking to the mayor – an older white man who’s used to talking to the press – there are standards to that. If he tells us something, we’re going to use his name, we’re going to put him in the paper. But, let’s say we find out about a family whose teenage son is having problems with a school district because he’s a special needs kid and he’s trying to transition to the halfway program that they have but there are a lot of problems with that program. [His parents] want to talk about those problems in hopes of making people aware that there’s an issue here in the school district, but they don’t want to go on the record because they’re afraid that people will consider that [the parents] have been problems. So, their kid is going to suffer for that [and] there may be ramifications there. They’re afraid as people of color, so that automatically adds an additional layer of complication to their lives. So, I’m suggesting that it’s an ethical obligation to differentiate between that older white male and person in power who’s used to talking to the press and someone who’s not and may have other, very real cultural reasons for not wanting to have their name in the newspaper.

Q: Do you have a name for this reconsideration of objectivity? And, how do you put it into practice?

We call it ‘active objectivity.’ The term “active objectivity”  comes from the scholarship that we are adopting. It’s an understanding of the way a journalist traditionally practices objectivity in a very passive way. [For instance, the journalist says] ‘You don’t want to give us your name? Fine, but we’re not going to necessarily be proactive about getting those voices into the newspaper if you’re not going to abide by our traditional tenets.’ Rather, we’re suggesting that the very premise of objectivity is to be balanced and fair in a way that appreciates all of the context that’s happening within that dialogue that we’re trying to get started.

Particularly when we’re talking about marginalized groups. One of my suggestions is that we talk to them about how we might amplify that voice in a way that gets the issues out there that works for them. Having those more collaborative, grassroots conversations.

Q: Your first book is coming out soon. What’s it about?

It’s called “Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities.” I originally wanted to document how a local community’s information ecology was being reconstituted by social media. I was particularly interested in how power dynamics affected that reconstitution, like whose voices were getting heard and whose voices were not getting heard even though we have these wonderful social media platforms that are supposed to amplify all voices.

So, that’s where we started in 2010, documenting all the media [reports] in Madison on the K-12 racial achievement racial disparities [in education] because it was a big topic in Madison and there was a lot of news around it and it was going to let me get at those power dynamics within an information ecology.

Right around that time, Madison Prep, the charter school that the Urban League of Greater Madison had proposed that was supposed to educate black boys and girls was [being considered].

So, I started documenting that conversation and started collecting actual data in September 2011 until September 2012 because that allowed me to get at the heart of the dialogue of the Madison Prep debate, Then the vote [on the creation of the school by the school board] was December 2011 and it also allowed me to get all of the post[-vote] reaction.

 It happened in a lot of different phases. Four phases, which included capturing everything about that topic on social media and the news to understand how that conversation was happening, by whom and where – the public conversation. We did a bunch of network analyses around looking at who were the top influencers in that conversation and who were they talking to, who they were citing and how did information flow. So, that’s the first part of the book.

Q: What’s the next part?

Then, we interviewed people – about 65 people in Madison who were involved in that conversation, asking them about the challenges of that conversation, what were some of the strategies for how [they] overcame those challenges in public talk.

We then added four other cities [Ann Arbor, Michigan; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Evanston, Illinois. and Chapel Hill, North Carolina] that were the same size as Madison and had the same K-12 racial achievement disparities. All of these cities had these huge civil-rights histories and these progressive ideologies that were steamrolling the conversations. I started realizing that it was about this progressive ideology and these long histories that these cities had that made these information flows act in the way that they were.

So, we interviewed people there and analyzed content and it all came out looking at how progressive ideology was really hijacking these conversations in a way that shut down real, true dialogue. [Residents of these cities] were all very loquacious about these issues. There were a lot of forums. There was a lot of media and a lot of blogs and a lot of Facebook posts about the various [educational] achievement disparities and the different proposals they were trying do or racial incidents in the schools.

Q: Who is the book for?

It’s for white progressives. And I say that in the book. Because I’m a white progressive and the book ended up being as much of a personal journey as it was a detached, research journey. I started having to do all of this social justice training myself to understand what I was looking at. In the course of that, I realized how many times I was stumbling, how many assumptions I was making, both in my position as a researcher and as someone in the power hierarchy and just as a citizen. 

I started realizing, ‘Oh, I have a lot of work to do myself and my own racial journey to go on’ that I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as ‘my race,’ in terms of a racial journey. That, I felt like, was a metaphor for what I thought these progressive cities, which were dominated by several white power hierarchies needed to go through as well. It’s sort of like a ‘Here’s how we can do that and here’s what to expect on that path.’

The last chapter is really dedicated to recommendations. I interviewed 10 international experts on how to have these conversations, how to have these conversations with yourself. But also how to interact in these communities with those conversations. Thinking about your progressive identity. Because the minute you start talking about [kindergarten] through 12th [grade] school systems we built to be equitable in a progressive understanding – all of these cities [we studied] have always been progressive and they have built these systems with the idea that they would be reformed from what the rest of the country would be like. We were supposed to have solved these problems and yet these are the places that have had the worst disparities in the country.

So, how do we have that conversation when you’re really talking about your progressive identity?

Q: Where do you see this book having the most value?

The biggest part of all of this for me was turning all of the findings into actionable white papers. It’s all centered around community dialogue and how can we talk about this in a productive way that doesn’t keep us just going around in circles.

Q: What were the big ethical hurdles?

It’s about public communication so journalism is a huge part of that, but it’s all the systems, all the institutions, the institution of education and politics, particularly progressive politics.

So, whenever you’re talking about institutions like those that have long histories of oppression, you’re going to be dealing with trying to work to change [and] to disrupt, [which] means coming up against ethical policies that have been enacted for long decades.

These are policies that have been deliberated upon for decades and decades. So, what I’m suggesting is that maybe those ethical principles are not being as aware or as accommodating to groups of people who have been oppressed within those systems.

MADISON, Wisconsin – Four members, three alumni from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, have joined the advisory board of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Journalism Ethics. Since its founding nine years ago, the board has contributed to the direction and growth of the Center while giving it direct connections to news and media industries.

The new board members are:

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  James Causey

  James E. Causey. Causey is an award-winning editorial columnist, special projects reporter and contributing editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist since becoming  at age 15 the first African-American high school intern at the Milwaukee Sentinel. He holds a bachelor’s in journalism and an MBA from Cardinal Stritch University. In 2008, Causey received a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University. During his time there, he studied the effects of hip-hop music on urban youth. After returning from his fellowship at Harvard, Milwaukee Inner-city Congregations Allied for Hope-MICAH, recognized his work on the mass incarceration crisis affecting black men. Causey also received a National Association of Black Journalists award in 2014 for his business piece, Buying Black. Causey is an active member of NABJ, former president of the Wisconsin Black Media Association, and member of Phi Beta Sigma Inc. He was also awarded the 2013 Morse-Marshall High School alumni of the year. Causey was a Scripps Howard Award finalist in 2013.

Katie Harbath

Katie Harbath (BA 2003). Harbath leads the politics and government outreach and economic growth policy teams at Facebook as a global programs director. She was the chief digital strategist at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. She previously led digital strategy in positions at DCI Group, the Rudy Giuliani for President campaign and the Republican National Committee. In 2014 Politico named Katie one of the top 50 people to watch and in 2009 she was named a Rising Star by Campaigns and Elections magazine.

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  Phil Haslanger

  Phil Haslanger (BA 1971 & MA 1973). Haslanger worked at The Capital Times from 1973 to 2008 as a reporter, city editor, editorial page editor and managing editor. He was part of the team that launched madison.com in 1995. During his time on the editorial page, he served as president in 2002 of what was then the National Conference of Editorial Writers. More recently, he was on the board of the Religion News Service and served as president in 2016. During the 2000s, he began exploring a career in ministry and was ordained in 2007 as a minister in the United Church of Christ. He served as a pastor at Memorial UCC in Fitchburg until retiring earlier this year.

   

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  Carrie Johnson

  Carrie Johnson (MA 1996). Johnson is a  justice correspondent for the Washington desk of National Public Radio. She covers a wide variety of stories about justice issues, law enforcement and legal affairs for NPR’s flagship programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Prior to NPR, Johnson worked at the Washington Post for 10 years, when she closely observed the FBI, the Justice Department and criminal trials of the former leaders of Enron, HealthSouth and Tyco. Earlier in her career, she wrote about courts for the weekly publication Legal Times. Her work has been honored with awards from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She has been a finalist for the Loeb award for financial journalism and for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for team coverage of the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas.

The new board members will join returning board members Kathy Bissen, Jim Burgess, Rick Fetherston, Peter Fox, Ellen Foley, Jill Giesler, Marty Kaiser, Carol Toussaint, Owen Ullmann and Dave Zweifel.

The board will convene this month with Jack Mitchell, a longtime board member and a professor emeritus in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, in his first year the Center’s board chair.

The Center also sends deep thanks to board members Tom Bier, Scott Cohn, John Smalley and Rich Vitkus, who wrapped up their terms of service. These four members contributed many years of service to the Center, seeing it through the transitions of two new directors and significant growth.

The Center for Journalism Ethics, housed in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-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 Megan Duncan, project assistant, at megan.duncan [at] wisc.edu.

Tom Beaumont is a national political reporter at the Associated Press. Beaumont answered some questions by phone about the ethical issues in reporting in an ever-changing, fast-paced news cycle.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

What journalistic practices, if any, should journalists do differently?

The one thing that frustrates me a lot is what I see an apparent disregard for regular journalistic standards in social media. I’m just talking about Twitter since that’s the only platform I’m on. I just keep it as spotless as I can because they’re watching, and they don’t need any more ammunition to indict the press. I am careful in how I reduce a headline to 140 characters. It’s gotta be clean, not just because it’s the right journalistic standard, but because I also represent the AP, which is not Salon. It’s not Slate. It’s not anything that has much of a voice except for the voice of authority. And it’s got to be authoritative. And it can’t crack. I don’t know if this is because the AP is kind of like the team that doesn’t have names on the back of its jerseys. That’s kind of what I like about the AP, we’re about the stories. We’re just about pounding the nail and driving the story.

I don’t know what it’s like for the coming generation of journalists, but I want them to watch themselves really closely, but without that impartiality, that’s when the fourth estate begins to decline or declines more rapidly.

How do you think journalists have done covering [President Donald] Trump’s Twitter feed and if anything, what should change about the coverage of it?

The AP’s White House team now has somebody up early every day checking that thing. Since the campaign we knew that he would get up early and opine on something, so we’ve been on that for over two years now. And because they come from the President of the United States’ account, they are presidential pronouncements. They drive the day. It’s unbelievable. This isn’t an editorial comment; it’s just a statement of fact. The House was getting ready to unveil tax legislation. The Senate was down to its last strike on health care. North Korea was threatening war, and Trump spent four consecutive days arguing on Twitter about the NFL’s role in observing the flag and the national anthem. The contrast to what he’s saying and what the policy is just needs to be pointed out, and that’s not an editorial statement, that’s just factual context. That’s remarkable.

How does the non-stop news cycle affect your coverage of government?

Trump has rewritten the book so to speak on political speech for this chapter and [former President Barack] Obama to an extent had rewritten political speech in a different way for the decade prior. It doesn’t change how the AP and how I as a member of the AP work because we’ve been a 24-hour news cycle since before cable. I haven’t been with the AP but for six years, but it’s a 24-hour cycle. We’re constantly updating. So in that way I think a lot of other print media have been catching up to the AP for the last several years.

How should we handle remarks and tweets that some deem racist or indicative of white supremacy?

I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to label him a white supremacist. We can say what he said. We can say he defended the actions of people affiliated with the group. But I don’t think that that’s even correct. It’s the same question of watching your words like you do on Twitter. If you report it accurately, people can argue with it. But if it’s defensible from the standpoint of objectivity, then you got nothing to worry about.

If you say the President first said there were bad actors on both sides of the Charlottesville clash, then that would be accurate. You could say that then he came out and denounced white supremacists, that too would be accurate. You could continue to say that he first came out against white supremacists, you can make the point that others are making by taking a shortcut by not taking the shortcut.

Some would say that using the term “lie” can hinder objectivity. What do you think of that?

The case in point was throughout the campaign, as in 2015 I was the reporter covering Jeb Bush. As the Republican campaign began, we could see how the other candidates were reacting to [Trump]. And it felt to me at one point to write more about the allegation that President Obama was not a natural born U.S. citizen because at one point Jeb Bush took issue with that statement with Trump. As it happens, when you’re kind of on the run, people pick something up and kind of run with it for a while. When I was writing about this, we, as a political team, came to the agreement that it was OK to call that a lie because it had been reported by us repeatedly. There was evidence provided by the White House that President Obama coughed up his birth certificate and yet Trump continued to say or alleged that the President was not a natural born U.S. citizen. It is a constitutional requirement of holding the office. That’s such a heavy accusation to make about a sitting president that once it’s proven to be false and he continues to say it, we would say, Trump continued to promote the lie that the President was not born in the United States.

That’s a long way of explaining the thought process, but it’s not just something that you fire from the hip. That’s an example of something that’s serious, that was proven to be false over and over and that he continued to promote. We came to the decision that that was OK to call it a lie because he had to have been aware that the evidence was there proving it otherwise.

Do you have this process with a lot of his statements or a lot of his tweets?

We, like a lot of news outlets, have what they call fact-checking teams. That term kind of annoys me because aren’t all stories supposed to be fact checked in real time? Isn’t that the burden of reporting to not just say, ‘He said x. She said y.’ ? But the AP does the math and puts a line of context in there to say which one has the evidence. We have dispatched a team of really good reporters and editors whose job now it is to constantly do that with Trump’s allegations because the factually questionable things that he offers are so frequent that it requires a team of a reporter and an editor, a couple of reporters and an editor to hound that stuff.

How much do you rely on confidential sources and what are some of the complications with using confidential sources in your reporting?

I think the chief complication is that I don’t know what the criteria are for other news agencies. I know what the criteria are for the AP. I trust it because I know when I’ve reported something and I know when others’ have reported something that we discuss, without disclosing too many company secrets, we don’t publish anything until we feel as an organization, that means we as an editorial leadership, everyone right up the chain, are cool with it.

But I don’t know how it moves within other newsrooms. I know that when we have it, it’s solid, and when it’s not, it’s not. I watch our AP news app all the time for corrections because it’s like  errors in a baseball game. You just can’t have the turnovers, to mix my sports metaphors. So I’m good with us, but we’re not in a vacuum. So if CNN is reporting something and The New York Times is reporting something and there’s an explosive denial from the White House, I don’t know what they’ve got. If it comes from the AP, I know who our team is and I trust them pretty implicitly. Like I said, the AP is like a 150 years old or something like that and you don’t get to be the world’s only global news outlet by trading falsehoods and reporting a lot of sketchy information.

What is the role of the journalist today?

I’ll tell you what I think the role of the political journalist is, and that is to drive the story forward of this revolution in politics that’s going on. This revolution of money. This revolution of speech, of reported information. When people are comparing Breitbart and the AP on the same platform that tells me that we have our work cut out for us because there is an entire segment of the population that sees them as the same – one abides by the journalistic principles that you and I are talking about, like fairness, context and I don’t know how it works inside the other one. But people have come to the same conclusion. I have to check my perception of reality all the time because you get into a lane and you start to see certain things in a certain way and you have to step outside that lane and make sure that you’re not going over the same ground. I have to continually remind myself that simply because I’ve reported something once, it doesn’t mean it’s true again.

Sometimes I think political journalism falls victim to groupthink and that’s dangerous. You’ve got to get outside that and look at things from different perspectives. That seems like Journalism 101.