Clash of media cultures

Take a look at this story and photo in the New York Times. The photograph, taken by Reuters, shows a Palestinian infant who was killed in a rocket attack being buried. It's tragic, but it's also an illustration of clashing media cultures. In the Arab world, images of death are routine. In the United States, they are unusual. Yet the Times, by publishing such an image, finds itself straddling both cultures.

Photojournalism ethics

For Thursday's class, please make sure you've done the reading for Week 8. I have some news in that regard. The university is in the process of moving the server on which our Syllabus and Online Reading List are located. You will now find it here. This is supposedly being done for security purposes, and it is not anything over which I have any control.

I also found that Dana Milbank's Washington Post story was no longer where it was when I put the list together. I've discovered a new link, and it should work just fine.

Attribution and citation

Almost the same thing. But not quite. I've gotten enough questions about this that I want to go over it one more time before you hand in your research papers on Thursday. This is a formal research paper — it's not a news story, and it's not a personal essay, although I know that a few of you are writing about a personal experience you've had.

The confusion that seems to arise is when you want to quote someone who was interviewed in an article. For instance, let's say Montana Republican-Democrat editor Melanie Cooper is quoted in an article in the American Journalism Review as saying the following: "Ever since the Stephen Glass scandal, we've made it a policy to run photos with any story where there might be questions about whether the people we portray actually exist."

Now, hold that thought. At the end of your paper you will include a bibliography that will list your primary and secondary sources. One of those sources will be the article in which Cooper's quote originally appeared. Your citation — keeping in mind that this is a fictional example — should look something like this:

Stevens, Peter. "After Glass, Editors Seek New Tools for Credibility." American Journalism Review, May/June 2004. http://www.ajr.org/credibility.html

(I'd do a hanging indent, but I don't know how in Blogger.)

All right, then. Let's return to your paper. Here's a paragraph that you might write:

Aficionados of the movie "Shattered Glass" may recall the moment when the office secretary tells New Republic editor Charles Lane that Glass never would have been able to get away with as much as he did if the magazine ran photographs with its stories. Sure enough, that's exactly what Melanie Cooper, editor of the Montana Republican-Democrat, is doing. "Ever since the Stephen Glass scandal, we've made it a policy to run photos with any story where there might be questions about whether the people we portray actually exist," Cooper said (Stevens).

As you can see, the paragraph contains both an attribution, to Cooper, and a citation, to Stevens. And we know what you mean by "Stevens" because, when we turn to the bibliography, we see the full citation for his article in the AJR.

You may use traditional footnoting if you wish, but in-text citations seem to be the way most research papers are formatted these days. As I have told you, I am not hung up on format; but I insist on thoroughness.

Some of you who have more experience writing research papers may wonder why I do not italicize the titles of magazines and newspapers (and books and movies). The reason is simple: I'm trying to follow AP style as much as possible. As you know (or as you should know), there are no italics in AP style. This is a holdover from the days when teletype machines literally couldn't transmit italic type. Even though that has long since ceased to be the case, AP style still hasn't caught up.

Because this is not a newswriting course, I will not mind if you choose to follow the more formal style of using italics for magazine, newspaper, book, television-show and movie titles. But please try to be consistent.

The New York Times' McCain story

We'll be devoting our entire class on Monday to the New York Times story on John McCain, which suggests, on the basis of suspicions voiced by two anonymous sources, that McCain may have had a sexual affair with a lobbyist during the 2000 presidential campaign.

There are three pieces that you need to read for Monday's class. Please print them out, make notes on them and bring them to class. Here they are, with links:

• The Times story
• A Washington Post story on the same subject, but handled very differently
• A New Republic article giving the background on the Times story

There may be other materials, including (I'm sure) some video. But we'll deal with that in class. I do not want to take the time for everyone to read these three articles. Please come prepared and ready to talk.

We'll deal with the ethics of photojournalism next Thursday.

What would you do?

Roger Darrigrand, a photographer for The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, poses a dilemma. If you're taking pictures and someone gets hurt, should you keep shooting? Or should you drop your cameras and help out? Please read how he answered that question. We'll talk about it a bit at the beginning of class on Thursday.

Tweaks to our schedule

If you're one of those students who likes to print out the syllabus and carry it around for the rest of the semester, then I want to let you know that you should do it again. I have made a few tweaks to reflect some changes in our schedule.

The most important is that your 750-word news story is now due on April 7 rather than April 3. This is to accommodate the fact that former Boston Globe ombudsman Richard Chacón will be our guest speaker on April 3. It makes sense that it is he whom you would make the subject of that story.

Media-concentration slides

You can download my PowerPoint presentation on media concentration by clicking here. I've also added it to the course documents, at right. I didn't get all the way through my presentation today, so I'll give it another go on Thursday. The I.S. people tell me that they thought we were in 39 Snell rather than 31, and thus couldn't find us.

Please make sure you are caught up in your reading by Thursday. I would like to try a classroom exercise during the last half-hour or so.

Guest speaker on Thursday

We will have the first in our series of guest speakers on Thursday. Callie Crossley, a former producer for the ABC news magazine "20/20" and a well-known television commentator, will join us during the latter part of the class to talk about the media and the run-up to the war in Iraq. In the first part of the class, I'll lead a discussion of the Danny Schechter documentary "WMD."

Research-paper guidelines

I've posted them here. You'll also find them in the course documents, at right, and I'll hand out hard copies in class on Thursday.

Thoughts on the Mitch Albom paper

I'll be passing back your graded papers tomorrow. For the most part, they were quite good. Grades would have been slightly higher if more of you had simply followed the assignment guidelines. In particular, I encountered repeated problems with insufficient and nonexistent citations. As I said in the assignment:

Strictly speaking, this is not a research paper, but neither is it an essay that you can write off the top of your head. I want you to do your homework on this. Be sure to cite all sources; the citation format is unimportant, but transparency and thoroughness are essential.

I also ran into a few problems with misspelled proper names, and with some of you citing only one code of ethics when I had specified two. (It would have been especially nice if more than a few of you had discovered the full text of the Detroit Free Press' code rather than relying solely on SPJ and ASNE.) Let's keep these things in mind as we move forward with the research paper, which will count for 30 percent of your grade.

Two issues regarding Mitch Albom's conduct came up over and over in your papers. Though there are no right or wrong answers to some of these ethical dilemmas, there are a couple of questions that I'd like you to think about.

1. Was Albom's column of April 3, 2005, an isolated incident? Many of you said that it was, which is why you decided to temper justice with mercy. Yet you will note that the Free Press' internal investigation revealed that there were other times when Albom wrote about games and news conferences as if he were there when he was not.

I was particularly struck by the Chicago Bears-Detroit Lions game that he "covered" by watching television. One of his editors suggested that Albom make it clear in his column that he was not actually at the stadium, and then noticed, after publication, that Albom had failed to take him up on that suggestion. The editor apparently did nothing, which speaks to extent of Albom's celebrity big-footing in the Free Press newsroom.

I would also suggest that if the two basketball players had done Albom the favor of actually showing up at the Saturday game, no one ever would have been the wiser.

2. Did Albom plagiarize? Here we get into an area in which I have to side more with Albom than with his critics. The Free Press has a strict rule that all quotes not gathered by its reporters must be attributed to the original source. That is an excellent rule. But it also goes against the customary practice at many news organizations.

Albom said his own rule is that quotations that were essentially already out there in the public domain do not need to be attributed. To the extent that Albom actually succeeded in following that rule, I think most journalists would agree he was acting ethically. As long as a reader would not reasonably believe that Albom himself had interviewed the person being quoted, then it's not plagiarism.

That's not to say it's good practice — as we know, it's prohibited at the Free Press. And there are times when sloppiness could lead a journalist not to cite a quote that should be cited. But "plagiarism" is probably too strong a term for what we're talking about here.

A final note: On many of your papers, I've corrected you for writing that Albom's offending column was published on April 2 rather than April 3. I later noticed that LexisNexis incorrectly stamped the publication date of Albom's column as being April 2. That probably reflects the fact that it moved out over the wires on April 2 for publication on April 3. In any case, this had no effect whatsoever on your grades. But it shows that it helps to check everything.

More on "WMD"

We'll have a discussion about some of the issues raised by Danny Schechter's documentary "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception" in class on Thursday, and possibly on Monday as well. (We're scheduled to have a guest speaker for part of our class on Thursday, so we may have to cut our "WMD" discussion short.)

Remember, if you were not in class today, you will be expected to find another way to see "WMD." The entire film is online here.

Although I think there's much of value in "WMD," there's no question that it's told from a certain point of view. Please be prepared to talk about whether you think the film is biased, and why. In particular, you were probably struck by the claims that the U.S. military may have deliberately fired on the media center at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. The Committee to Protect Journalists investigated that claim, and found it had no basis in fact. Here is an excerpt:

A Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) investigation into the incident — based on interviews with about a dozen reporters who were at the scene, including two embedded journalists who monitored the military radio traffic before and after the shelling occurred — suggests that attack on the journalists, while not deliberate, was avoidable. CPJ has learned that Pentagon officials, as well as commanders on the ground in Baghdad, knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of international journalists and were intent on not hitting it.

However, these senior officers apparently failed to convey their concern to the tank commander who fired on the hotel.

If you read the entire report, you will see that Jules Crittenden, an embedded reporter for the Boston Herald, had direct knowledge that the military had come under attack from rocket-propelled grenades, and that U.S. troops were attempting to take out a forward observer.

Since the tank commander apparently did not know that the Palestine Hotel was the headquarters for journalists, the result was a tragic accident.