Tag Archives: media ethics

Sex, lies, and the pregnancy that never was

Posted on February 13, 2012 | 4 Comments

Gaby Rodriguez was a 17-year-old high school honor student in Yakima, Wash., when she hit upon an imaginative senior project on teen pregnancy. She would declare she was pregnant. In the months that followed, as she bulked up with a home-made prosthesis, she would log the comments of friends, family and classmates to her condition.

Rodriguez got approval from her teacher and principal, even the schools superintendent. Only her mother, boyfriend and one or two intimates were in on the ruse. In April, after six and a half months, she came clean during a school assembly, where she passed out index cards on which she had recorded remarks she had overheard and had students read them aloud.

Then she pulled the pregnancy bump from beneath her pullover. “I’m fighting against those stereotypes and rumors,” she said, “because the reality is I’m not pregnant.” She was warmly applauded by her fellow students, and lavishly praised by her teachers.

After the local paper, the Yakima Herald-Republic, broke the story, it became a minor sensation, and was widely reported here and abroad. Rodriguez did celebrity turns on ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today Show. She’s writing a book. By the time she formally presented the results of her experiment in May, she was no longer speaking to reporters, on instructions of her literary agent. A Lifetime Channel movie, “The Pregnancy Project,” starring Alexa Vega as Rodriguez, debuted last month.

I had missed this affair until I got an e-mail from a former colleague, Harris Meyer, an award-winning journalist and ex-city editor at the Yakima paper. Meyer was alarmed by the generally uncritical way in which the media had embraced and extolled Rodriguez’s project which, he noted, rested on a sweeping deception. It was “a case of unethical human experimentation,” he wrote, “ill-conceived and potentially dangerous.”

The media did swoon. “I admire her so much,” her principal said on Good Morning America. “Her courage, her creativity, her strength.” The segment ended: “Gaby plans to present her findings to community leaders to help young Continue reading →

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Remember Iraq?

Posted on January 1, 2012 | 9 Comments

 

The U.S. war in Iraq ended just before Christmas, and if you blinked you probably missed it. TV news coaxed some seasonal sentiment out of the troops getting home for the holidays, but the Sunday morning talk shows—where news of consequence is usually autopsied—barely noticed. The Beltway sages had weightier matters to discuss, such as the Gingrich ascendancy and the latest Congressional standoff.

The silence was understandable because the topic is so awkward. The Iraq war wasn’t a defeat, like Vietnam. But it wasn’t a win either: Saddam Hussein is long gone, but the strategic menace the invasion was meant to thwart was bogus, the installation of democracy seems shaky at best, and the country seems on the verge of tearing itself apart again.

Besides, the Iraq victory lap was used up back in 2003 when George W. Bush, in a supreme moment of presidential buffoonery, pranced across a carrier deck in flight regalia to declare peace just as a calamitous civil war was starting.

So while the news media might like to imply that the war concluded successfully, that’s a hard case to make, especially with our Iraqi friends referring to it as a “foreign occupation.” And faced with a perplexing moment of historical ambiguity, the media did what they do whenever a clean story line eludes them—change the subject.

Our country isn’t unique in making war needlessly, but we may be unique in our insouciance. Attention really should be paid. After all, destroying another country is a big deal. Between 105,000 and 130,000 Iraqi civilians died Continue reading →

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Remember the wave of satanic child sex abuse hysteria? You should

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 1 Comment

The accounts of sexual predation involving coaches at Penn State and Syracuse haven’t yet boiled over into a full-fledged moral panic, but there’s good reason for the media to be mindful of that potential. It has happened before, notably in the wave of hysteria—and prosecutions–in the 1980s and ‘90s over sweeping accusations of ritual sexual abuse at child day care centers from South Florida to the Pacific Northwest.

The scale of that lunacy is rarely discussed now, and to people who weren’t around it’s almost unimaginable. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in a tough 1998 series by reporters Andrew Schneider and Mike Barber, summed it up this way: “During a prosecutorial fury that swept the country from 1980 to 1992, there were at least 311 alleged child sex rings investigated in 46 states…. Children told stories that were appalling…. sex rings were run by Satanic cults, dozens of children raped by scores of adults, dozens of babies were killed and eaten, horses slaughtered in playrooms, children raped by men in black cloaks while the women waited in line for their turn.”

The scathing P-I series was prompted by an especially egregious case that broke in 1994 in the small central Washington town of Wenatchee, where 60-some people ended up charged with 29,726 counts of abuse involving 43 children.

By then, a national pattern had emerged of inquisitorial fervor and investigative contrivance: Triggered by fears with paper-thin support, panicky parents–some of them unstable–would demand action. Preschool-age children would be coaxed by so-called experts to recall, or imagine, extravagant sexual atrocities from months or even years before. Their denials were counted as symptoms of repression, hence as confirmation. Physical evidence was rare. Adult “witnesses” were leaned on heavily to back prosecution theories. Scores of people were convicted and sentenced to Continue reading →

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The Romenesko Affair: Seeking fairness in the tough world of news aggregation

Posted on November 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

For more than a decade, one of the most influential figures in the U.S. news media has been someone few people outside the business ever heard of, an ex-newspaper reporter in suburban Chicago named Jim Romenesko. His influence derived from his daily blog, which consisted of capsule descriptions and links to reporting about the media published elsewhere.

Newspeople followed Romenesko’s blog closely. It became the premier community bulletin board, directing the attention of journalists to controversies, scandals, layoffs, promotions, and newsroom foolishness of all kinds. The attention he gave, or denied, to the latest dust-up helped ensure its prominence or its obscurity. (I myself have benefited from his linking to my columns.)

Romenesko worked for the Poynter Institute, another powerful and little known force in the media. Poynter, based in St. Petersburg, Fla., is a nonprofit, mid-career training academy for journalists. Its seminars and conferences reach hundreds of journalists a year, and its website is an emporium of columns and service features on best practices of all kinds. Romenesko’s blog was a marquee attraction.

Together, Romenesko and Poynter have had major influence on professional standards and practices, so word that they parted ways after 12 years couldn’t fail to be big news, especially when the breakup was provoked by questions raised by the Columbia Journalism Review, the country’s oldest industry watchdog, about their own standards and practices. The ensuing row offers insight into one major area in which journalistic practice is evolving or, some might say, deteriorating.

At issue is perhaps the most valuable and most popular journalistic form to emerge in the digital era, the news aggregation site. Continue reading →

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On transparency: When coming clean isn’t clean enough

Posted on September 26, 2011 | 3 Comments

 

TechCrunch is a highly regarded news site that was founded in 2005 and won a reputation for scoops on Silicon Valley dealmaking. AOL bought it last year as one of several big moves by the onetime online powerhouse—moves that included acquiring Huffington Post and installing impresario Arianna Huffington as AOL editorial chief—to reinvent itself as a must-visit emporium of news and comment.

At the time of the deal, reportedly worth $30 million, AOL said it expected TechCrunch’s entrepreneurial founder, Michael Arrington, to stick around for at least three years. Then came word earlier this month that Arrington was starting a venture capital fund, which would sprinkle seed capital on tech startups. Called CrunchFund, it had among its early investors AOL itself, which put up $10 million of an initial $20 million in funding.

Here’s where it gets tacky. Although Arrington would step aside as TechCrunch managing editor, both he and the site would continue to cover projects that the fund would help bankroll.    

That is a notable departure, to say the least, from customary journalistic protocol, which demands that reporters steer wide of topics in which they have personal stakes. And so the fat hit the fire. After all, the potential wasn’t just pimping the Continue reading →

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