Just the worst. News & Record's ethical lapse

GREENSBORO, NC -- I know newspapers are stressed. I know that, for years now, they've been trying to do more with less — or even less with less, without folding. And sure, entrenched old fogies paralyzed by shock and lacking new ideas but unwilling to relinquish the reins carry plenty of the blame for being slow to innovate. Nonetheless, a certain level of quality requires nothing more than conscientious attention to some basic standards and it is something a news enterprise can do immediately with no cost.

As Jay Rosen argues, the days when it was enough to just give both sides of a story — without providing any additional viewpoints or fact-checking — are over. He said/she said journalism is both an ethical lapse and a failure to understand how the media business itself has changed. -- Matthew Ingram 

I first started paying attention to local media about the same time I started seriously paying attention to local public policy. It was around 2000, when Greensboro went all out, successfully, to recruit what was then supposed to be the mid-Atlantic overnight cargo sorting hub for FedEx. I won't re-litigate the arguments for and against here. Suffice it to say that there were people with concerns that this city, desperately watching the last vestiges of its once solid furniture and apparel manufacturing evaporate, was investing all hope in lofty promises of great benefit while avoiding any serious consideration of costs. Fourteen years later, the worst fears have not materialized—attributable to the fact that the hub's promised activity has not materialized, never getting close to the projected 126 flights per night.

Terribly frustrating during the period of public debate was that the local media, the News & Record in particular, clearly took the pro-hub side and subtly but effectively marginalized the opposition. That's when I first noticed the insidious he said/she said "reporting" tactic in action. It's simple. Lazy, misleading and simple. Instead of reporting empirical facts as facts, report them as the assertions of someone. Then report someone else "arguing" against them. There is no need for fact checking, when both "sides" have been reported. Where do the facts lie? Who knows?

This is, unfortunately, exactly what Taft Wireback brings us with his Sunday front-pager "How dangerous is coal ash? Well, that depends," inspired by the recent Duke Power coal ash spill into the Dan River.

Wireback begins by posing the question:

Is this power-plant byproduct the “toxic sludge” so threatening to the state’s ground water, streams and lakes?

Wireback never gives his readers a real answer. He could have reported the results of water quality studies conducted after the Dan River spill for some actual empirical measurements of toxicity but, instead, he is content to let two parties duke it out, each with his assertions and giving the largest megaphone to "coal ash expert" John Daniels, a UNC-Charlotte professor who has consulted with Duke Power and who is working on making useful materials from coal ash. It is the perfect bad example of the ethical lapse of he said/she said journalism. Thus, Wireback "reports" such demonstrably false and grossly misleading nuggets as this.

The 1 percent of coal ash with a potential to harm involves such metals as arsenic that humans ingest routinely in small doses every day, Daniels said.

“You could have drank a liter of Dan River water on the day after the spill and close to the spill, and you would have consumed less arsenic than you usually ingest from other natural sources” daily, he said.

Reporting unchecked assertions was never good journalism, even back in the days of the FedEx hub debate. Its deficiencies are even more obvious now in an age where people have empirical sources at their fingertips. The News & Record should ask itself just what benefit this kind of he said/she said reporting, free from fact checking, brings to its audience. The answer is none and continuing it puts an unnecessary obstacle in the path of an already challenging future for the News & Record. It should stop, once and for all.