However, CTV didn’t report the story the same way as the Citizen or CBC. When CTV first reported on the missing man, it left out the connection to their anchor. Why? The general manager told the Citizen it did so “‘out of respect for her wishes’ after police issued a media release.”

“She asked us yesterday (Thursday) to leave the connection out, and she asked police to leave the connection out. But first and foremost the consideration was that the attention should be focused on nothing more than the search for Greg and for his missing vehicle, so that as quickly as possible the family could be reunited.”
Source: The Ottawa Citizen, CTV Ottawa anchor surrounded by support as police seek missing husband

A day later, CTV made the connection in its story.

Judging by the outpouring of support on the CTV News website, I think everyone can agree that we hope there is a happy end to this story. I hope there is.

However, the way CTV Ottawa handled the story reminded me of a similar situation in a newsroom I was once in.

One night, we got word of a fatal car crash. The deceased was a sibling of a senior editor, who was obviously not going to make it in that tragic night. After a confab in the middle of the newsroom involving every editor and reporter, it was decided to write the story up as a brief because the police had issued a release with the name of the victim made public. Normally, we would have gone to the victim’s home, knocked on the family’s door, done a “pickup” where we asked for a picture of the deceased, and then talked to the family hours after the tragedy to garner a brief bio of the deceased to put in the paper the next day. In this case, it was decided to give the family some space because we knew who they were.

The decision did not sit well with everyone, me included.

It was the double-standard that I didn’t like, a double standard that the missing person story raised again this week.

The Canadian Association of Journalists ethical guidelines is a good place to start. It says that when reporting on any story, a journalist or organization should “not allow our own biases to impede fair and accurate reporting.” The CBC has a similar line in its ethical guidelines. CBC/Radio-Canada reporters are to keep in mind that “public interest guides all our decisions.” As well, the CBC lays out to its reporters that it is to treat everyone fairly. Why? “The trust of the public is our most valued asset. We avoid putting ourselves in real or potential conflict of interest. This is essential to our credibility.”

The New York Times in its ethical guidelines has a similar statement that lays out exactly how it sees covering any story:

Companywide, our goal is to cover the news impartially and to treat readers, news sources, advertisers and all parts of our society fairly and openly, and to be seen as doing so. The reputation of our company rests upon that perception, and so do the professional reputations of its staff members. Thus the company, its separate business units and members of its newsrooms and editorial pages share an interest in avoiding conflicts of interest or any appearance of conflict.

That appearance of conflict is, possibly, even worse than having a conflict of interest. Granting someone privacy during a moment of grief is not a conflict of interest. Consider what The Toronto Star says in its reporting guidelines about covering grief and tragedy:

Conflicts between the public’s right to know and the expectation of privacy of individuals are inevitable in the gathering and publishing of news, but common sense, our duty to inform and compassion should govern our judgment.
[...]
Intrude on private moments of grief only when the public has an overriding and justifiable need to be informed.

Reporting the connection between a deceased and a member of a news organization covering the story, I think, is a way to avoid a conflict of interest or the hint of impartiality. You need not trample on their privacy, but if you do it for one, you should do it for all. That was the lesson I learned years ago after that confab and had reinforced this week.

Just a quick glance online suggests that there are few newsrooms that have a specific section in their guidelines on journalistic practices that deals with reporting on our own. Rather, guidelines on personal or familial connections largely have to do with connections to political parties or organizations that are the subject of coverage.

Guidelines for reporting on a story involving a journalist from the same outlet is something newsrooms should consider putting down on paper (as antiquated an idea as that sounds in today’s digital world). If not, then newsrooms should fall back on what already guides our journalistic judgment: We treat everyone fairly, we treat everyone the same, because to do otherwise not only brings into question the transparency and accountability of our news stories, but the profession as a whole.

“If you watch the news and don’t like it, then this is your counter program to the news.”

Jon Stewart along with Stephen Colbert have become cultural icons for many young news consumers who spurn traditional media in favour of, well, fake news programs. While many, including myself, watch Stewart and Colbert for a good laugh, they also watch it for a “deeper level of processing,” according to a new study. In other words, they want to think more rather than think less when they watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

The study from the University of Delaware found that university-aged viewers wanted to watch the Daily Show and Colbert Report for context as opposed to information or a good chuckle. The university’s website quoted lead researcher Dannagal Young, an assistant professor of communications, as saying that such viewers show a high need for cognition, or a need to have deeper thinking processes to analyze arguments and ideas, and problems and their potential solutions.

“We know that the reasons people seek out information strongly affect the implications of those messages,” Young says. “In this case, people coming to the show looking for satirical analysis of political information may exhibit more long-lasting shifts in attitude.”

Interestingly, that finding parallels a 2008 study that found that people used fake news shows to update their impressions of political candidates and personalities. The study suggested people take this information and then add it to the running score they kept on a candidate, a scoreboard system that is one way citizens make political and voting decisions. On the other hand, the study found that people who watched news shows, such as those on CNN, were prompted to learn more about candidates, issues and procedures.

“We don’t consider ourselves equal opportunity anythings, because that’s not – you know, that’s the beauty of fake journalism. We don’t have to – we travel in fake ethics.”
- Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart has repeatedly said that he is not a journalist, nor is his show a source of journalism. It is political satire and social commentary — context for what happens politically in the United States and around the world. It may be that context that drives viewers to his and Colbert’s program. One theory is that the reason people watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report is because both shows focus on just a few stories each show and then have an in-depth interview — a format harkening back to an earlier era of broadcast news — rather than quickly scanning through a number of stories in a 30-minute or one-hour newscast. Young news consumers are interested in more context in news stories and avoid “above the fold” scanning. The Daily Show provides that context and, apparently, a deeper cognitive experience. Just more reason to watch them daily.

Moral of the story? What’s unique — sometimes what’s unique to the newsroom members — is what is considered news. Secondary moral? What is news is largely a subjective decision because what I find newsworthy you may not and vice versa. You can see this on a daily basis online through a completely unscientific comparison of the most prominent stories on a news website compared to the ones highlighted under the most read list. You can also see it at the end of a year when newsroom put out their top stories of the year lists, and compare the newsroom selected stories against those of the readers. I did this with the lists developed at Postmedia, where I work, which are based on polling of Canadians and an unscientific poll of top editors across the chain. I also took a look at the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s studies about the stories that captured the greatest percentages of the annual newshole versus the top stories the public followed.

For the most part, there is much agreement about the top stories of the year, which shows that newsrooms and readers appear to be in sync about what is news. The economy, for instance, was of major concern to news consumers in the Pew study, and so too was it important to newsrooms.

But there were also diversions. The Pew study pointed out that readers wanted to know more about rising gas prices, there was very little coverage of it in the American press. And while the News of the World phone hacking scandal attracted media attention, relatively few Americans were interested in what was happening across the ocean. At Postmedia, the biggest story of the year internationally for editors was the Arab Spring, while readers chose the death of Osama bin Laden.

So how is it that what news consumers felt were the biggest stories of the year didn’t completely jive with what Postmedia editors selected as their top stories?

I have two theories.

The first is that the public may be seeing the impact of one story, rather than the impact of an ongoing narrative. The death of bin Laden ended a narrative that began 10 years earlier on Sept. 11, 2001, while the Arab Spring started a narrative that has included the toppling of dictators, continues to evolve and unfold. It may also be the narrative’s proximity and impact on the news consumer that makes bin Laden stick out more than the Arab Spring. By proximity and impact I mean the proximity of the 9/11 attacks to American and North American cities and the resulting impact on Western society. Those two news drivers make the killing of bin Laden more newsworthy, in a sense, than the Arab Spring, which is an ocean and a bit away from the average North American news consumer.

The second thought I have is that news consumers may only be reading the headlines and keeping a tally of the most recent stories they have seen. Research has shown that viewers don’t perfectly remember every story they watch in a news broadcast, nor do they have perfect recollections of the news stories they consume in print. They may not remember the ongoing headlines about the protests in Egypt or the demonstrations in Tunisia that were at the forefront of news coverage over the spring and summer when the Arab Spring began. They may not have gone “below the fold” and read more than just the top headlines of the day — as a 2008 Associated Press study showed — when the Arab Spring moved from front page to inside news. Newsroom editors may have constantly been handling copy about the Arab Spring, and therefore had if forefront in their minds.

Does that mean newsrooms are wrong in their choice of stories? No, but what it means is that newsrooms need to be in tune with their news consumers, avoid blind spots in coverage and ensure that the stories people want to read about get as much coverage as the stories they need to read about. That involves interacting with news consumers, maybe bringing in a member of the public now and again to serve as an honorary editor for a week or opening up news meetings to the public either in person or streaming them online. It means interacting with them on social media to see what stories they want to see covered. And it means having a diverse newsroom with a number of viewpoints to question the stories being assigned and propose others that may not be on the newsroom radar. That sounds like a lot to ask for, but I think just a few ideas such as these, which newsrooms have already adopted, spread across the entire news sector can make for a better news relationship in 2012.

That’s why this essay in The Fix by Quentin Rowan about his history of plagiarism is really interesting. He likens his propensity for copying and pasting the words of others into his own texts to an addict. As a recovering alcoholic, Rowan compares his need to drink to his need to be the best writer.

Before I knew this was a disease, I saw myself purely as a screw-up. Morally weak. Perhaps one day plagiarism will be seen, if not as a disease, at least as something pathological.

I find only one major flaw with this: I don’t think plagiarizing journalists are all addicts of stealing the words of another. I think it has more to do with an inability to accept failure — the ability to say to a newsroom manager, “I couldn’t get the story.” Failure isn’t one of those things newsrooms take well, but there are enough editors and producers who know that reporters do their best, and even the best of reporters can’t land every story. Failure is part of the job and the best journalists allow room for failure. The ones who can’t handle failure, and turn to plagiarism to avoid it, are the ones that I don’t want in a newsroom.

Plagiarism may be a disease for some — just as the urge to steal is a disease deemed kleptomania — but it is not a disease for all.

Have a read of the article and make up your own mind.

Media bias seemed to be one of those issues that kept coming up this week and it drove me nuts, largely because defining bias is so tricky that I have to re-read a lot of the academic literature on the subject to refresh my memory. Are we talking about content bias? Or is it distortion bias? Or, are you referring to decision-making bias? Are you confusing bias with slant, or slant with framing?

In one sentence this week — actually two sentences if you count the question that triggered the answer — I heard a reference to decision-making bias, specifically the decision-making bias of news outlets to not cover a particular event. Let me briefly explain.

On Wednesday, one of the country’s most prolific anti-abortion protesters, Linda Gibbons, had a hearing before the Supreme Court to have a 17-year-old temporary injunction against her quashed. The injunction prevented her from protesting within a certain distance of Toronto-area abortion clinics, which she continued to do resulting in ongoing trips to jail. Myself and another reporter covered the hearings, which were very technical arguments about Section 127 of the Criminal Code that neither of us understood in their entirety, but we got the gist of it.

After the hearing, the other reporter who covered the hearing asked Gibbons about the lack of media coverage and interest in the story. Here’s what Gibbons said:

“What was said just now that they don’t want to muddy the injunction issue with what’s hiding behind (it),” she said, referring to a question I had asked a few minutes prior, “… I think the same thing is with the media. Because this is related to what is happening behind closed doors at Toronto abortuaries, that they want to remain mute on that because they don’t want to get into the abortion debate again. But, let the debate begin.”

I’m not interested in discussing the abortion debate. I’ll leave that to others. I just want to focus on the issue of bias springing up when the media decides not to cover an event. And very simply, you can’t make a charge of bias based on what is or isn’t covered.

Making the argument for that is just as difficult as making the decision-making bias argument without being able to speak with the journalist at every step of the story process. There are millions of stories that get missed every day because newsrooms have to decide how to allocate resources as best possible and to the stories that have the maximum number of news drivers behind them. If your story doesn’t get covered, it might be because there just weren’t enough bodies to spare that day — it happened to me on more than one occasion while working as the sole reporter on weekends. That’s not a sign of bias — it’s a reality of the news business.

I could get into the whole notion of the “hostile media effect” that distorts the perception of bias among the most partisan of people in an issue, but I’ll save that for another week. For now, I’ll just finish by saying that bias is more difficult to identify than simply counting the number of reporters or stories an event generates. It requires a more scientific approach over time.

I was ecstatic.

I had been reading about the Royal Commission on Newspapers for weeks, actually going through the 200-plus page report in two days, seeing it as a landmark moment in the history of Canadian news. I noticed that the man who chaired the commission, Tom Kent, was a retired professor at Queen’s University, meaning he was in Kingston — the very place I was studying.

“I wonder if he’ll grant me an interview?” I thought.

So I emailed him, wondering if an out-of-work journalist could land an interview for a blog that received few hits.

Mr. Kent,
I was hoping you might talk with me for a piece for my blog looking at what has taken place in the two decades since the Kent Commission. I was hoping to get your thoughts about the state of Canada’s news industry and whether the federal government will ever look into the issue of concentrated ownership.
If you’re interested in chatting with me, I could e-mail you a few questions or give you a call at your convenience.
Thank you very much for your time.

A response wasn’t long in arriving.

I regret that my answer to your question, whether government will do anything about ownership concentration, has to be a gloomy “not in the presently foreseeable future”,  But if there are other questions you want to raise, e-mail them and I’ll see whether any useful answers are possible.

       Tom Kent

So I sent him a list of questions on Feb. 15, 2011 and waited. Ten days later, an email arrived.

Some of your penetrating questions require regrettably lengthy answers. They are attached.

Tom Kent

Sadly, Tom Kent’s time has come to a close. I read this morning that he had passed away at the age of 89. Here is just one bit of the obit already online:

Founding editor of Policy Options, a prolific contributor to the commentary pages of The Globe and Mail and other media outlets, he was a firm believer in developing public policy to make people’s lives better.

That public policy included developing a better media landscape to ensure the Fourth Estate was the people’s watchdog.

Mr. Kent, thank you once again for taking the time to answer my questions all those months ago. It really meant a lot. Below are the links to the Kent Commission series:

• Media ownership in Canada, 30 years after the Kent Commission
• The Kent Commission report
• The Kent Commission conclusions
• Talking with Tom Kent (Part 1)
• Talking with Tom Kent (Part 2)

This year, I thought about a line that the character V has in the film. It’s a simple line, but poignant nonetheless:

There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.

“For those who will listen.” Let’s focus on that.

This movie is, at its core, accepting truth and following the facts no matter where it leads you. The problem is, words give truth to those who want to believe them. Too often, we trust those words blindly and take them as truth without doing our due diligence as responsible, critical information consumers. To paraphrase V, aka Hugo Weaving, I know why we – me included – do it. It’s easy. It’s comfortable. It’s too difficult to thrust ourselves into the chasm we must conquer to separate fact from fiction and follow the facts to the truth.

We like the easy truth. For instance, why sort through thousands of websites when we can click on the first link, which research has shown to be the case for college students? Why face alternative ideas that may challenge our beliefs when we can be wrapped in the warm blanket of familiarity (a.k.a. Cognitive Dissonance)? And finally, why be skeptical of our own cynicism? The answer is favoring simplicity over complexity.

Accepting as difficult, accepting as complicated the mere ability to become fully “literate” in modern society is the first truth that we should accept. Once that has passed, the learning and practice should be a little simpler.

I learned that tidbit of information not by forgetting what I’ve read or seen or heard in the news, but from a research study that helped inform my thesis. (And yes, I’m kind of glad that I didn’t forget about this particular bit of research data.) Here’s what I wrote in a paper about how the mind processes information contained in a news story:

Critical scholarship has shown that few people can recall many of the news items they have watched minutes before and that “many confuse, or misunderstand key aspects of the message content (Couldry, Livingstone, & Markham, 2007, p.32).” As Wyatt, Mazza, and Snyder (1993) argue, there is no evidence supporting the belief that consumers have a perfect memory of the news coverage they consume.

So when I wrote about a public opinion survey the Department of National Defence conducted about Canadian’s opinion’s on the military, I wasn’t surprised by this finding from telephone surveys and focus group interviews:

Canadians are less likely to recall recent media coverage of the Canadian Forces than they have been since tracking began in 2008.

Then there was this:

A repeated theme in the focus groups was the desire to see more positive stories in the media about the Canadian Forces, rather than what they perceive as a focus on the negative.

If they can recall fewer stories about the military, how can they remember the overall impressions of what that coverage entailed? The fact that news consumers have a hard time remember news they have just consumed leads one to wonder what they have retained in their memories.

It’s possible that their beliefs were formed based on accessing the most recent memories in their mind, a cognitive — or memory recall — process known as the cognitive accessibility theory. In this process, the most recently activated memory nodes are given more weight in the decision-making process than older schemas and memories (Valentino, 1999, p.294). The study mentioned that data collection took place during the launch of the mission to Libya — I wonder then how the coverage of Canada’s participation in that mission affected the beliefs of the average news consumer.

Cognitive dissonance, or dissonance theory (O’Keefe, 2009; Stroud, 2008; Claussen, 2004), predicts that news consumers will makes decisions about media exposure based on their personal and political beliefs. Cognitive dissonance theory argues that news consumers will only consume information that fits their pre-existing schemas. Information that contradicts or questions pre-existing values and beliefs can make a person uncomfortable. Cognitive dissonance theory expects that people will try to avoid this uncomfortable cognitive experience at all costs.

It’s also entirely possible that what they are remembering is what they have chosen to remember, those stories that stick out to them because they disagreed with the content. This idea of audience bias could explain why they felt there wasn’t enough “good news” about the military: They only remember the bad news. (Tangent: There may have also been “good news” stories about the military, but when decisions are made about what stories are to receive more play than others, the “bad news” received more attention than the “good news.” Just a thought.)

Now, before you think I’m just here to bash this study, let me tell you I’m not. Every research project has its strengths and weaknesses. This kind of qualitative study has a number of benefits: It provides a rich view of the subject under consideration and allows the voices of the participants to really shine through. This public opinion poll also added a quantitative analysis to add weight to the findings and help make them generalizable. It’s helpful if you’re making policy, but like any study, there are inevitable questions in the findings that should give pause to anyone using the data for strategic decision making.

And as thanks for reading this post, here’s some George Carlin.

The news out of France this morning that a weekly, satirical newspaper had been firebombed overnight came just as the paper put out an issue with a picture of the Prophet Muhammad on its front page. According to Reuters, the font page had a picture of the Prophet Muhammad with a speech bubble with the words: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.” The paper made a reference to Sharia law in its masthead and said that the Prophet Muhammad was the guest editor for the week. Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, and many Muslims find any such depictions offensive.

In one article I read this morning, the editor of the paper (the real editor) said that the publication did not intend to be provocative with its cover, but designed the issue as a sort of thumbs-up to the Arab Spring.

Excuse me, but if you know that depictions of Islam’s holy prophet is offensive, why do it at all? Just seems like a bonehead move and forgive me for not really believing your response. So why do it at all? The answer that may inevitably come back is, “freedom of speech.”

And this is where problems emerge.

How far does freedom of speech actually go? How far does freedom of the press extend? What is within those freedoms and what is not? Is the freedom so sweeping that anything is allowed, which is essentially the case in the United States under the First Amendment? Or, should that freedom come with limits and responsibilities, such as the case in Canada with the notwithstanding clause and section one of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that imposes reasonable limits? These are all good questions that could stoke a great classroom discussion.

In my opinion, if you’re going to run a piece with something that is blatantly offensive to the core values of a religion or any other group of people, maybe you shouldn’t run with it, unless it is there to make people think about an issue or enlighten the average news consumer.

I don’t condone violence and don’t see it as a constructive avenue for recourse in a case such as this. All violence like this does is stoke the fires of unrest between those who see freedom of speech as absolute, and those who would see it greatly reigned in. Ideas should be shared, but shared in a way that makes people think, even if they get upset by what they read, see or hear. The point is to provoke thought, not provoke rage. Finding that balance is what freedom of speech entails.

There was a haunting sound hovering around the voice of the reporter detailing the death and destruction that followed the alien landing on Earth.  “People are trying to run away from it, but it’s no use. They’re falling like flies!” he cried describing a haze of deadly gas wafting through New York City. The broadcast on Oct. 30, 1938, was a radio drama by a future filmmaker named Orson Welles of The War of the Worlds, a novel written by science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells. (I put that in because I don’t want to mistake Orson for H.G.) It is also played a role in shaping media literacy, the roots of which are found in the 1930s.

The 1930s witnessed the introduction of motion pictures and the public became nervous about the negative effects film had on the day’s youth (Martinson, 2004). This particular fear about media having a wholly negative effect on young people led to the first emanation of media literacy, a teaching approach that stressed protecting children from media rather than teaching them to critically engage with media, including Mr. Welles now infamous broadcast.

Anyone who tuned in at the outset of the program was made well aware of what was happening. However, those that tuned in late didn’t receive the same warning and some mistook fiction for fact. It was actually that bit about the deadly gas that sent families racing into the streets covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, while others called newspapers and emergency services in hysteria over the “invasion.” Reports at the time noted that people gave into their hysteria and neglected to notice subsequent explanations of the broadcast, warnings that could have prevented the spread of panic, or the warnings in newspapers (yes, people actually read those at that time) about the broadcast and its contents. The extent of the panic is disputed — including whether the suicides and heart attacks for fabrications that also became fact — but it is the fact that panic existed at all which is of prime concern to me.

But not everyone believed what they heard. Later studies showed that those with critical thinking skills — those who were more media literate — were less likely to have been taken in by the hoax (Martinson, 2004).

Now, you would think that 73 years after the original broadcast — and 73 years in the evolution of media literacy education — that the public would be less likely to be taken in by a hoax, but the irony is that it still happens. Be it the death of a celebrity on Twitter, or the Balloon Boy, or fake information posted to an online bio, the news media and the public still fall for hoaxes without doing enough fact checking. Journalists are taught to “follow the money,” a quote made famous by the 1976 movie All the President’s Men in order to get to the truth. Students should be taught to “follow the facts” to get the right information they need and avoid being taken in by a hoax.