I hadn’t heard of the “Ellie Light” letters to the editor before today, but the story of the man who says he wrote them was interesting nonetheless.

I’ve railed against news web sites that let readers post anonymous comments after stories. The practice goes against long-held standards we use in print – vetting for libel or nastiness, verifying authorship, maintaining civil discourse.

Recently, a lawyer told me and my colleagues that newspapers don’t have time to call the writer of each letter to the editor and shouldn’t be expected to.

I know that’s not true, and said so.

I was an editor at a weekly newspaper in upstate New York. I called for each and every writer, or the letter didn’t run. My colleague made fun of me for trying to reach the name at the bottom of the form letter from the Girl Scouts.

Readers should expect that newspapers have made a reasonable attempt, at least, to verify the names behind the opinions on their pages. It’s a basic duty.

What happened at the newspapers that ran “Ellie Light” letters? Did they try to contact the writer? Did Mr. Steward lie to them?

I’m eager to read explanations from editors whose publications were duped, namely: How can we trust your pages next time?

Here’s one from Ben Smith of Politico, who didn’t mind that he couldn’t verify who wrote the letter.

Kudos to Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Sabrina Eaton, who was more skeptical than opinion page editors across the country should have been.

- Andy Schotz, chairman, SPJ Ethics Committee

Interesting story from the Times that deals with purported “investigative journalists” who were nothing more than reckless partisan activists operating in what appears to be an illegal manner and claiming a journalistic purpose:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/politics/27landrieu.html?hp

Political perceptions and the fate of an important social organization have already been influenced by these goons, through dissemination of the products of their freelance “journalism” in mainstream outlets. One of their supporters defends their Acorn videos as “a kind of ‘60 Minutes’ undercover-exposé — going where ‘60 Minutes’ fears to tread.”

We’ll be seeing more of these hybrid so-called journalists as the MSM lay off employees and fill the news gaps with the work of freelancers and researchers whose purposes and techniques would not have passed muster in traditional journalism settings. And, of course, they will proliferate online, on new sites that claim to be journalistic.

The challenge for those interested in preserving ethical journalism will be figuring out how to help the public distinguish between clowns like these and credible journalists using ethical (not to mention legal)  journalism techniques.

Peter Sussman
Member,  Ethics Committee

One of the stories that sparked a discussion and led to SPJ’s statement about Haiti news coverage was this one by ABC, which helped an Iowa couple find an orphan they planned to adopt.

Here, Steve Buttry, who is related to that Iowa couple, writes that there are times when journalists’ humanity should take over, and this was one.

The Society of Professional Journalists in a December news release stated that NBC News practiced “checkbook journalism” and “breached widely accepted ethical journalism guidelines by providing the plane that carried David Goldman and his son Sean back to the United States from Brazil.”
The release raises several issues critical to journalistic ethics and to the SPJ membership itself.
Foremost is the issue of fairness – or the appearance of fairness, always a matter of concern to professional journalism. The SPJ ethics code says journalists should fairly seek and present accurate information from all sources. However, the release condemning NBC failed to present NBC’s response to the accusation. Rather, it was rushed into distribution and only later was NBC’s response presented – and then in the SPJ ethics blog, a different place and one in which readers must seek out the information.
Second, the case against NBC is weak. Other network magazine programs provide transportation to those featured in their stories. NBC did interview the Goldmans on the flight back to the United States, but the story had already been told by media around the globe. There was no scoop. NBC did secure interviews for its news, Dateline and Today programs, but that’s a common practice among other network and cable programs as well. While SPJ makes it clear that it is not an enforcer of the code and cannot place sanctions on any news organization, its public pronouncement of guilt based on practices common among other networks – and without investigation or hearing – seems an unwarranted and humiliating pillory of NBC.
Perhaps most important, the public will see NBC’s giving a lift to the Goldmans as an act of kindness to a father and son who endured a particularly trying ordeal in a foreign country. To criticize such an act as a breach of ethics makes the accusers seem petty, ill-intentioned, and ham-fisted at public relations. It’s not that those in a position to make damning pronouncements should base their judgments on what will please the public, but they should be able to back up their words with strong and logical support that the public can both understand and embrace. Sallying forth with a weak and possibly unfair case is less than sensible – and, in the end, hurts the accuser’s credibility.
The journalism world is changing and journalists must realize that information is no longer exclusively the product of the traditional news media. Broadcast has a plethora of information programs, not to mention 24-hour news broadcasts. The Internet is everyone’s information dispenser and source of information. The Goldman story was not exclusively NBC’s story. The “news” of that story was around the world before the NBC jet landed in Orlando.
Another and more recent SPJ news release cautioned journalists in Haiti about “making themselves part of the stories they are reporting.” Again, the news release makes a judgment – that media flying medical experts to Haiti make themselves part of the story and thus are acting questionably. Some of those experts, however, are doctors, and they are treating the injured. Some are also medical reporters, and they are reporting what is happening as well as what they are doing. That’s the story. What does it matter that they are part of it? Isn’t that abstract and unrealistic notion trumped by the needs and lives and well-being of hundreds of thousands of victims?
News media regularly create and report stories: A reporter poses as a patient to expose a quack, a news medium hires an accountant to investigate fraud, a reporter lives on the street to tell the story of the homeless, a reporter lives on a farm to tell the story of farm life, and more.
And then there are the annual fund raisers that media stage to help the needy. Media create the story, promote it, manage it, and report its success and the stories it generates. Is that not being part of the story? And would we ask them to stop? Of course not.
News media hire experts to report on specialty topics of which their reporters have little or no knowledge. In the case of Haiti, the news broadcasters hired doctors to report on medical news. And those broadcasters sent their experts to Haiti to report on the terrible medical chaos and need in that earthquake-stricken country. To criticize the broadcasters and the experts they sent for “being part of the story” is out of touch with reality. Are journalists to merely report and ignore the injured and dying? Of course not – especially when they are doctors. Are they to ignore the stories they uncover in the process of helping? Of course not, that’s why they were sent there. And the stories they tell are more credible because they are first-person accounts of the medical difficulties involved in the disaster.
A code of “ethics” that fails to recognize the supremacy of human crisis and need is not a code to be proud of. But I, for one, do not believe SPJ’s code does fail in this regard. The problem is apparently one of interpretation.

As coverage of the Haiti earthquake continues, a recent SPJ statement reminds journalists of the balance between covering the news and stepping outside that role to help, which shouldn’t be done just because it would make a good story.

In a different vein, Rebecca Solnit wrote in Salon about the tone of media coverage after disasters. In particular, she suggests that accusations of “looting” in so much news coverage is fundamentally wrong.

I like her reality-driven rewrites for photo captions.