TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/103089/10308900.072

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 6KB | 107 lines

PRESS, Page 87

Dog-Bites-Dog Journalism

A personal view of the perils of underchecking stories

By Laurence I. Barrett


    Most journalists occasionally encounter what might be called
the Insider's Lament. Anywhere non-newsies can corner them, someone
carps along this line: "Dammit, on subjects I'm personally involved
in, you guys often get it wrong." The critic usually adds that if
he had been consulted, all would have been right. How a journalist
responds to this generic complaint depends partly on his tact and
hubris quotients. Insiders with their own strong views, after all,
tend to cavil about competing ideas and stories they consider less
than comprehensive. But when I run into the I.L. these days, I find
myself saying, "I know what you mean."

    Explaining this sympathy requires one of those shoe-on-the-
other-foot tales. Perhaps dog-bites-dog is a better label. Like
many Washington-based agents for large news organizations, I am
mentioned in other publications now and then. Our work is parsed
by press critics; we get into contretemps with the powerful; we
serve as filler for the growing number of gossip columns. All this
is, in principle, legitimate. Those who groan reflexively when
needled or critiqued simply confirm the aphorism about journalistic
skins being thinner than the average American adult's. What stokes
my personal I.L. is the frequency of error in these items. The
venerable practice of checking ostensible facts with the story's
subject seems to be declining.

    Granted, these worrisome conclusions rest on totally
unscientific research. A few recent mentions prompted an inspection
of my ego folder of clippings going back several years. Some of the
contents were unsettling. Having no reason to believe that I was
being singled out for special hazing, I decided that purveyors of
the I.L. have a larger point than the news business should
tolerate.

    The Washington Times, for instance, recycled a story from
MediaWatch, a right-wing newsletter. MediaWatch's conviction is
that the national press corps is a left-wing cabal bent on
discrediting conservatives. In that spirit, it took TIME (and me)
to task for coverage of a controversy involving Republican National
Committee chairman Lee Atwater. MediaWatch is of course entitled
to its ideology. But in parroting the MediaWatch article as fact
-- including the erroneous assertion that no TIME reporter had
sought Atwater's side of the story -- the Washington Times
neglected to check with the target of the criticism. The paper
dutifully ran a correction.

    Political bias is only one element of the unchecked-error
syndrome. Another could be labeled the pseudoauthoritative dodge.
Washingtonian, a prosperous, glossy monthly, does an annual salary
survey. This fall's version, listing hundreds of names linked to
specific monetary figures, appears to be based on serious research.
Eight TIME staffers were cited. Mystified, several of us agreed
that the figures were wrong (by 30% in one case) and that none of
us had been consulted by Washingtonian. The writer, Robert Pack,
explained, "You don't call hundreds of people and ask them what
they make because they won't tell you." Pack insisted that he had
knowledgeable sources for his numbers. A Washingtonian editor,
however, acknowledged that such stories are "ball-park estimates."

    Then there is the boner buried in commentary. A classic example
of that appeared in a Washington Monthly review of a book of mine
back in 1983. The critic mentioned that I ate breakfast with Ronald
Reagan at the White House and "spent weekends with the President
at Camp David." Neither assertion was true (not one cornflake with
Reagan, not one hoofbeat at Camp David). These and similar
inaccuracies supported the punch line that excess access might have
warped my perspective. The reviewer later explained that he'd
lacked the time to check the information.

    In fact, the Monthly often scolds the rest of journalism about
unsound practices, with access being a particular bugaboo. It
dutifully acknowledged the errors two months later -- after others
had repeated them. Editor Charles Peters now says his writers
usually do check with people they criticize. "The time you don't
do it," he adds, "is when everyone knows what the other guy would
say. Even then, it should be done."

    That exploratory phone call, of course, is no guarantee of
accuracy. New York magazine inquired whether I had reviewed a
manuscript for possible serialization in TIME. Yes, I had; no, we
wouldn't. But the item relating this routine transaction attributed
a direct quote to me ostensibly delivered to "colleagues." The
remark, never uttered, was not checked either with me or with the
editor to whom I had reported. Later, the New York Times Book
Review picked up the unfounded quote. The news section of the same
Sunday edition carried an editors' note pointing out that the
original gossip-page item in New York had been denied.

    For the sake of balance, I must report that many clips in my
ego folder are unexceptionable. National Review, for instance,
recently hollered indignantly about the tilt of something I'd
written. Fair enough; my prose was quoted accurately. Still other
stories are both factually correct and somewhere between benign and
laudatory. (These will be suitably framed and hung on my office
wall as soon as time permits.) But there are enough unalloyed
clinkers in this little collection to raise disturbing questions.
If Washingtonian didn't get my pay right, how many other numbers
in that story were wrong? If the New York Times -- ostensibly the
newspaper of record -- adopts a dubious item from a gossip column,
how many other colorful anecdotes are published without being
checked for accuracy?

    More broadly, if too many news organizations neglect to check
their facts, how long before the Insider's Lament becomes
everyone's? In a business whose cardinal asset is credibility, that
notion should be unsettling.