Cruel and unusual punishment

The US newspaper industry doesn’t half make life difficult for itself, what with all those scandals, refusing to publish enormously significant stories for months and months, and its insistence on a uniquely earnest form of writing for much of the content <insert own reference to pot, black, etc, here. And, yes, sorry this post is so long - it’s two which ended up as one>.

But you have to feel a bit sorry for those US newspaper folk in the wake of the West Virginia mine tragedy.

The horror of the 12 deaths was, as you’ll know, compounded when the families of those trapped were told their loved ones were still alive. It’s not clear who made that mistake, but as the families celebrated America’s newspapers went to press. Of course, they led with news of the miracle rescue.

Note this wasn’t some hazily researched "flier". The reporters’ sources were good: the governor of West Virginia, and the deputy secretary for the West Virginia department of public safety. No reporter or editor would not have run with that story.

Three hours later, presumably as the delivery trucks left the print plants, the horrible truth emerged. Twelve were, in fact, dead. The newspapers were caught out; by sunrise, readers who already knew of the deaths from TV and radio were picking up newspapers still proclaiming a miracle.

It was a tragic, horrible mistake, made worse by newspapers’ deadlines. It certainly wasn’t the papers’ finest hour But it wasn’t, really, their fault. Nor, as the most tasteless, self-obsessed headline of the day suggests, was this a "media disaster, too" (never mind the pain of the 12 bereaved families - feel ours!)

So why is Dale Peskin, over at the American Press Institute’s Morph blog,
calling the Washington Post’s coverage "another embarrassing error"?
Because, it seems, the Post’s online operation did not delete or edit
the original, wrong story from its print editions, choosing instead to flag it up as wrong, and write a completely revised version elsewhere.

Moreover, the "wrong" (early) version remained on the JPG image of the day’s print edition, and linked to from the "print edition" page on the website.

The truth is, had Washingtonpost.com changed any of these things, they’d have instantly been accused of trying to cover up their mistakes and rewrite history. They did the right thing by leaving the archive intact and honest, and then updating with a correct story.

Acting differently - disturbing what should, for the most part, be a sacrosanct archive, would have been far more damaging. Peskin doesn’t address this complexity, but then this kind of media sniping rarely does.

Meanwhile, I’ve even got to disagree with the normally spot-on Jeff Jarvis’s analysis of coverage of the West Virginia mine tragedy. He writes:

"One terrible lesson of the West Virginia mine tragedy is that you can’t trust the news. You never could; it has always taken time to see whether stories pan out, to get all the facts, to find out the truth."

He’s right that finding out the truth has always taken time. But we’re heading for disaster if you say you shouldn’t trust any news ever - just as he’d be wrong to say you should always.

Again, we’ve someone skirting the complexity of the problem, when complexity is exactly what we should be revealing. The more we tell our readers that things aren’t black and white, that things are rarely that straight, the sooner they can get to the point of - as he says later in the some post - finding their way through the fog of news. But if, in Jarvis’s world, they can’t trust any news, they’ll never make it through.

The thing is, journalism needs to get better at flagging up which bits are more reliable, and which are less. We need to learn, when there’s fog, to say "we think this is the case" rather than pretend we’re fresh off the Mount with our tablets of stone.

I’m not advocating foisting responsibility for this off onto others in a "he says but she disagrees" boreathon, but I am arguing that we actually use our knowledge of a situation to express any uncertainty that might exist. That implies reporters becoming much more savvy about their subject matter, because that kind of feel for what’s right and what’s not only comes with knowledge.

And nor should such a policy lead to acres of vagueness; the best reporters will go that extra yard to gain certainty.

While we’re on the subject, we could also argue that in the US their suffocating impartiality-is-all attitude in the nation’s press could usefully be replaced by an acceptance that all but the simplest events are reported through a lens that might leave important aspects out of focus.

Not that any of this would, really, have counted in West Virginia, because the sources who should have been 100% reliable - indeed, those whose job it is to pass on these vital, literally life-and-death facts - got it tragically wrong. Reporters can’t check, or double source, information from a collapsed mine shaft.

For a project at work, I happened to be sifting through the famous essay by great Guardian editor, CP Scott, written on the occasion of the paper’s 100th anniversary in 1921. It might be antique, but it still seems very relevant today.

"It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair. This is an ideal. Achievement in such matters is hardly given to man. We can but try, ask pardon for shortcomings, and there leave the matter."