Last Updated: June 29, 1999
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Credibility
Since circumstances beyond the newsroom’s control affect
the reputation of a newspaper, it’s important to think about rebuilding
credibility as a company-wide project
In the week in April that tobacco billboards came down across America,
the San Francisco Examiner published an editorial headlined “Adios, Marlboro
Man.” The end of the billboards, it declared with satisfaction, was “yet
another setback for the huge tobacco corporations.”
The same week, the San Jose Mercury News ran an optimistic editorial
titled “Rx for tobacco tax money,” discussing county plans to spend $27.5
million from increased tobacco taxes. The paper earlier had denounced the
cigarette industry for lobbying against the tax increase.
Within a few days, both papers carried a full-page color advertisement
for Carlton cigarettes.
So which was it? Were the papers critical of tobacco companies or were
they urging people to smoke? What’s a reader to believe? Are cases like
these relevant to the alarming problems of credibility that Christine D.
Urban has identified in her exhaustive report for ASNE, “Examining Our
Credibility: Perspectives of the Public and the Press”?
Editors, at this point, may be upset. Everybody knows they have nothing
to do with the ads in the paper. Everybody knows that even as barriers
come down between journalism and business, the separation between decisions
involving news and advertising remains unbridgeable.
I certainly know that. When I was an editorial page editor at the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch, we published hair-raising editorials demonizing Big
Tobacco. At the same time, the paper carried a lot of cigarette ads. It
made perfect sense. Editorial writers spoke for the paper. Ad people did
not.
Now and then, we heard from readers about this inconsistency. We would
explain how they needed to “understand the way things work” at newspapers
and patiently lecture them on the Sacred Wall Between Church and State.
Then they would hang up, usually unsatisfied.
But if we the journalists know how ads and editorial policies at cross
purposes co-exist easily in the same paper, does it follow that readers
should understand and accept this contradiction?
Increasingly I’ve come to believe that readers often are justified in
being confused by what they see in newspapers: inconsistencies and contradictions,
errors of fact and grammar, coverage that they read as biased and we say
is “analysis” or “perspective.” These things affect our credibility.
Urban says “readers don’t care whether the reporter was rushed, the
staff was down three people, or the copy editor was too busy laying out
pages to catch the misuses of the common language.” They’ve paid their
50 cents for the paper. If the muffler falls off on the way home from the
dealer, who cares if the assembly line was short-staffed?
There are some things about credibility that journalists cannot repair
alone. Not all these involve matters as clear as the dissonance of advertising
and news content. The credibility of a newspaper is everyone’s responsibility
from editor, ad manager and circulation director to cub reporter and the
person who picks up the phone.
To be fair, Urban did not address advertising in her study, but I began
with the editorials and the Carlton ads because I would argue that it’s
the total experience of a newspaper — everything you see in print, how
you are treated by its employees, whether it shows up on the porch or in
the bushes — that determines its overall credibility.
Path one: Publishers
Which brings me to the first path to credibility. It runs through the
office of the owner or publisher. He or she is the one who can make credibility
an institutional priority. When the big civic journalism project rolls
out through the neighborhoods, it doesn’t help when inner-city residents
are told they can’t get home delivery or get the Sunday advertising coupons
in the paper from the box. That newspaper has just lost credibility. These
contradictions need attention from the top.
Path two: Editors
The second path to credibility lies in what 1998-99 ASNE president Edward
L. Seaton wrote to preface Urban’s report. “The public wants us to get
back to tending our gardens,” he wrote. But what does that mean? Seaton
quoted former ASNE president Creed Black: “Editors should start editing
again.”
This amounts to a call for a return to old-time religion at a time when
the faith is severely tested and new theories and technologies everywhere
seem to undermine the traditional notions of objectivity, of telling it
straight, even of accuracy. For example, the Journalism Values Handbook,
published in 1996 by ASNE, calls for accuracy to be redefined as “accuracy/authenticity,”
and declares that it is as important to get the right facts as it is to
get the facts right so the coverage will “ring true.”
Accuracy means being exact; authentic means something can be believed.
The believable is not always the truth; often that which “rings true” is
just conventional wisdom. Which is more important for credibility?
At the convention, I was asked by Michael R. Fancher, the executive
editor of The Seattle Times, if I liked teaching. Love it, I said, but
I miss being in the newsroom. Fancher smiled.
“A lot of editors would say the same thing,” he said.
To tend to their gardens, to start editing again, editors not only need
to make the content of their papers their consuming priority but they must
be — and be seen — in the newsroom. But as editors know, their job today
is more complicated than in the past.
They need to be part of the institutional silo-busting, whereby the
rigid, vertical realms of news, advertising, circulation, marketing and
production yield to a more interdisciplinary approach. They need to be
the chief facilitators of the newsroom, to orchestrate platoons of consultants,
to become architects of contemporary newsroom structure, and to become
executives of new media.
In all of this, irresistible pressures accumulate to delegate news decisions
— not about the Pulitzer-bound project of the year but the daily, humble
requirements for attention and judgment on stories from across the town
and around the world. These are the stories that over time give the paper
its character, its quality and, yes, its credibility. The stuff that gets
talked about at the morning news meeting the editor used to attend.
In this era of unprecedented emphasis on editors-as-managers, the landscape
is littered with the wrecks of journalism gone awry: Patricia Smith, Mike
Barnicle, much of the Clinton/ Lewinsky coverage, the Chiquita Banana fiasco
... “One Screaming Mess After Another” says a recent cover of Columbia
Journalism Review.
And yet many new things that journalists do cannot just be dropped.
How does an editor fulfill the responsibilities of the new editor/manager
with the austere requirements implicit in the Seaton-Black prescription?
If owners and publishers understood that the single greatest contribution
an editor can make to the success of their enterprise is to edit, it could
make a mighty difference. Have you told that to your owner or publisher
lately?
Path three: The test-site newspapers
The third path to credibility lies in the work already begun by eight
newspapers that have volunteered to be sites to test the findings from
the Urban report. It is important neither to expect too much nor too little
from these experiments but to see them as building blocks to a better understanding
of the credibility problems.
As I reflected on them, a story came to mind that you might call the
parable of the unhappy people. Imagine a society where everyone once was
fit. Now they all smoke, drink too much and their diets are terrible. They
are all under stress. Their faith no longer sustains them. They do not
exercise. They rarely are at home. Their old friends are leaving them.
They feel fat and lousy.
Little by little the awful evidence piles up. Utter ruin lies just ahead.
They commit themselves to better health. So one of them stops drinking
to see if that makes him healthy; and one stops smoking to see what it
does for her life. Each by each, they do something different: This person
takes up yoga, another swears off McDonald’s fries, a third starts jogging.
In a year they will meet to see how much healthier they are. What they
will find is that the one who stopped smoking but kept drinking and eating
those greasy fries and doing all the other bad things will still be unhealthy
(and still unhappy). The same will hold true for the rest, for they are
learning that good health is the accumulation of many smart habits. Unless
you practice them all, you are unlikely to get back your old fit self.
That is why we should not expect too much from the eight papers’
experiments. But what the unhappy people also will have found is that the
one who stopped drinking felt better much of the time and achieved a lower
triglyceride level. The jogger lost weight and got some cardiopulmonary
benefit. They have discovered collateral benefits. So the jogger sees the
wisdom in living better across the board and stops drinking, smoking and
eating junk food.
That is why we should not expect too little of the eight papers’ experiments,
either. They are likely to show us is that small steps toward the restoration
of credibility through the elimination of certain unhealthy practices (being
cavalier and inconsistent about corrections, say) will produce positive
results in ways that can be measured narrowly and perhaps also yield collateral
benefits. And just as quitting smoking is more important than yoga, some
of the experiments will have deeper or wider benefits than others.
The trick is not to interpret these narrow findings too broadly. A paper
that now has a better corrections policy may still suffer errors of grammar
and spelling and will go on publishing dirty copy that readers notice.
Now the parable of the unhappy people, of course, grossly oversimplifies
the problems that Urban has identified in close detail. And the solutions
of the unhappy people are far simpler and less demanding than what the
test papers are doing. San Jose’s excursion into “prosecutorial editing”
may well produce some real unhappiness on the staff.
Similarly, the examination by The Gazette in Colorado Springs of what
readers think is news and what journalists think is news could well be
wrenching for its newsroom. What will come of it, I think, is that the
public view of what’s news will turn out to resemble the definition of
news that once prevailed in the old days that Ed Seaton and Creed Black
hearken to. If you read Urban’s report closely, you’ll find that the readers
are saying that they, too, want us to get back to the old way’s straight
stuff, accuracy, good spelling, apple pie like Mom made.
Tending our gardens
As every section of the report shows, readers are not dumb but educable.
They have followed the text we gave them and learned it perfectly. For
years, the lesson plans they found on Page One taught them that news was
war and peace, the wheat harvest, the stickup at the bank, what the city
council did last night, the tornado in Oklahoma, the charity drive going
over the top and, now and then, the man who bit the dog.
Suddenly we changed the curriculum, and they got a new text with the
Bobbitts and O.J. Simpson and a president dropping his pants; and the public
said, this isn’t news, to which we replied, you bet it is — now. We trained
them one way and we’re surprised when they say we don’t print news anymore.
Returning to the garden Seaton writes about won’t be simple. A great
deal has happened since we were last there. There is so much that we editors
cannot fix by ourselves. We write our editorials and someone accepts the
Carlton ads and the result is oil and water, and the readers know it. Even
so, it’s time to get back to the garden and tend it — if we can still find
that old, old place we all came from.
Woo, former editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, teaches journalism
at Stanford University.
