John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists

Knight Fellowships 2005 Symposium

Credibility in an Age of 24-7 News

  • Symposium Audio (Stanford iTunes)

    • 2005 Symposium Panel

    Katrina Heron, author and former editor of Wired magazine.
    Tim Porter, writer of the journalism blog, First Draft.
    Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of the Portland Oregonian.
    James R. Bettinger, (Moderator) director of the John S. Knight Fellowships.

    Journalists address media credibility

    By Will Oremus
    Stanford Daily, May 17, 2005

    The same day that Newsweek retracted a story that many believe contributed to deadly riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan, three professional journalists speaking on campus yesterday offered divergent views on the debacle's implications. The event was pulled together at the last minute after Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker canceled his scheduled John S. Knight Lecture.

    At a panel discussion on media credibility in the age of 24/7 news, sponsored by Stanford's Knight Fellowships program, Portland Oregonian Editor Sandra Mims Rowe said Newsweek's gaffe would lead news organizations to be more careful about how they use anonymous sources. Newsweek has admitted that the May 1 story – which alleged that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed the Koran down a toilet to unsettle Muslim detainees – was based on the word of a single anonymous government source.

    "There's a huge gap between thinking you know something and knowing something," Rowe said. "That's a gap that we have to close."

    Rowe's fellow panelists said they envision more wide-ranging consequences.

    Tim Porter, author of the journalism blog First Draft, said Newsweek's mistake was indicative of a skewed set of values on the part of major news media institutions.

    "The value system rewards scoops," Porter said. "It's internally based. It's journalists valuing the work of other journalists, rather than a value system based on benefit to the community or benefit to the reader."

    Porter said he hoped that the decline in the public's confidence in the news media, fueled by incidents like the Newsweek story, would spur a long-term shift in priorities away from speed and exclusivity and toward context, collaboration and accuracy.

    But former Wired magazine editor Katrina Heron said it's too late for all that. Traditional national media institutions like Newsweek "are headed the way of the dodo," she said, since the Internet has opened access to so many different sources of news from around the world.

    "The public is way ahead of the curve, already engaged in new explorations," she said. "People tell me constantly, 'I read this interesting thing in Al-Jazeera today.' "

    The audience was relatively small but attentive and participatory. Attendees included Newsweek San Francisco Bureau Chief Karen Breslau, who took the microphone at the end of the panel to offer her perspective on the discussion.

    "One thing I'd like people to think about is how few news organizations left aspire to and have the resources to do foreign news coverage," Breslau said. "I don't ever want Al-Jazeera to be my news source."

    Breslau added that blogs, as useful as they might be in some regards, are no substitute for on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who strive to report the news objectively.

    Other questioners in the audience worried that the Newsweek scandal would have a "chill effect," prompting major news organizations to refrain from publishing controversial stories.

    The panelists responded that there is still a place for anonymous sourcing in investigative coverage, but that there is no excuse for printing a story based on the word of one anonymous individual.

    Still, the journalists expressed empathy for Whitaker.

    "These mistakes get made and they are unforgivable, but on some level they are understandable," Rowe said. "You have to be incredibly vigilant about the information you're dealing with, and you have to know on some very profound level that you're influencing lives and potentially deaths also."

    Communication Prof. Jim Bettinger, director of the Knight Fellowships program, said Whitaker called him at 5:44 p.m. Sunday to say he wouldn't be able to give his lecture, entitled "Choices in an Age of 24 / 7 News," the following day. The Knight Fellowships program acted quickly to cancel a follow-up symposium scheduled for today and enlist two of its participants to talk last night.

    Knight Fellows in the audience said they felt the panel raised interesting issues, even though no consensus emerged.

    "People, both the public and journalists, are very concerned about media credibility," said Phillip Davis, a Knight Fellow who regularly works as a correspondent for National Public Radio. "There's a feeling that some proactive steps need to be taken. That's a good sign."

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