New handbooks for journalists offer 'roadmaps' for fairness

By Maurice Fliess
The Freedom Forum Online

08.10.00

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PHOENIX — Handbooks to guide journalists and journalism students on what to do — and not do — in newspaper and television newsrooms were released yesterday at a convention of journalism educators.

The handbooks, "Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists" by Robert J. Haiman and "Best Practices for Television Journalists" by Av Westin, reported findings of the Free Press/Fair Press Project launched in 1998 by The Freedom Forum.

"Our hope is that you share our belief in the high value that fairness should hold for journalism students and that you will examine these handbooks for their potential in your classrooms," said Robert H. Giles, senior vice president of The Freedom Forum (and recently named curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University).

Giles, Haiman and Westin addressed a session of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention.

Haiman, a former St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times executive editor, said it dawned on him during the Free Press/Fair Press Project's public roundtable discussions and in meetings with journalists that fairness issues should be part of "the basic education of journalists during the time when they [are] still students."

Westin, a former vice president of ABC News, suggested that his handbook could be used in college classrooms "as a roadmap" to show "how bad things have become in television news" and how daunting is the challenge for the next generation of TV journalists.

Haiman's 74-page handbook is organized into nine chapters, each of which addresses how to restore fairness when newspapers:

Get the facts wrong.

Have ignorant or incompetent reporters.

Refuse to admit errors.

Rely too heavily on anonymous sources.

Prey on the weak.

Concentrate on bad news.

Lack diversity.

Allow editorial bias in news stories.

Can't admit that sometimes there's no story.

The complaint sounded most often by the public was "that the press gets so much so wrong so often," Haiman said. People are distressed by "the constant, sloppy stream of spelling errors, grammar errors, wrong names, wrong titles, wrong addresses, wrong dates, wrong numbers and other similar mistakes."

This finding from the roundtables held around the country was buttressed by a scientific survey conducted last year for the credibility project of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Haiman urged the educators to "take a hard look" at the accuracy standards being set in reporting and writing courses. He suggested that the Chicago Tribune's program to eradicate inaccuracies from its news columns could serve as a model in journalism education.

To address the problem of "ignorant or incompetent reporters," journalism students should be advised to forego the notion of taking a wide assortment of liberal-arts courses to prepare for work as "generalists," Haiman said. Because the world today is "vastly more complicated than it was just 10 or 15 years ago," journalism students should be "steered ... toward doing more in-depth work in a specific field" as a second major or a minor. That way they will be better equipped to cover a specialty such as business, finance, science, the environment, land use, health care or globalization, he said.

Overall, Haiman said, fairness should be "a regular part of the conversation in every journalism course."

In his 100-page handbook for television journalists, Westin sounded some of the same themes. They surfaced in interviews he conducted with dozens of TV newspeople at networks and local stations.

Westin presented portions of the interviews in his handbook as "sound bites," without attribution, which he called "an arrangement that assured maximum candor." His chapter-by-chapter lists of best practices were based on the same series of interviews.

He said the emphasis on fairness, accuracy and balance that characterized the formative years of television news has all but disappeared. Instead, profit margins rule, he said, and this translates into periodic staff reductions and perpetual ratings worries — "a bleak picture" indeed.

The challenge for journalism educators, Westin said, is to turn out aspiring broadcast journalists who care about such core values as fairness. They must find their "moral compass" while in school, he said. It can't wait until they begin their careers in the helter-skelter environment of TV newsrooms, he added.

Addressing the problem of racial and cultural bias in television journalism, Westin saluted CNN for making every employee watch a 20-minute video about unfair stereotyping. He recommended that the journalism educators obtain the video for their students.

To increase diversity in newsrooms, he recommended that TV news organizations "spend money on training programs to give minority high school students the skills to understand and meet journalistic standards. Build a talent bank for the future by recruiting and training minority students, giving them internships, guiding them in selection of college courses, and promising a good-paying job upon graduation."

Among other recommendations, Westin said news managers should:

Have plans in place — before a story breaks — on how to use mini-cameras, helicopters and other "technological wizardry."

Create a formal system for mentoring young staff members.

Establish a separate editorial oversight system for Web material to assure that unedited "raw" video does not "[wend] its way into the dot-com world."

The Freedom Forum will distribute copies of the handbooks to daily newspapers and television stations nationwide.