WHEN NEWS TRAVELS TOO FAST: The dangers of media speed

"We are being taught through social media responses to react as fast and as loud as possible – much to everyone's detriment," writes a teacher of ethics and critical thinking at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.  The "haste of acquiring information," says Tauriq Moosa, is "detrimental to proper responses, let alone proper reporting." 

Former Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg (left) and Dunlop Media's Charles Feldman, formerly of CNN (right), discuss the dangers of media speed at the 2009 Global Travel and Tourism Summit.   

Moosa agrees with Dunlop Media specialist Charles Feldman, who expressed similar sentiments in a recent book on the subject.  "The public's right to know," said Feldman, "has been supplanted by the public's right to know everything, however fanciful and even erroneous, as fast as technology allows."  Courtesy The Guardian. 

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TV NEWS FAILED EVERYONE IN THE ZIMMERMAN CASE

RALEIGH, NC:  Broadcast coverage was relentless during and after the nationally televised trial of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin.  Veteran journalist and college lecturer Doug Spero, a Dunlop Media associate, monitored the output - and couldn't believe what he saw. 

George Zimmerman, who was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin, in a still image from a video provided by Sanford, Florida, police.   

"What we have had here is an acute case of agenda-style infotainment," Spero wrote in a nationally published op-ed piece.  "Pioneering TV journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite would, no doubt, be horrified. "   Courtesy The Christian Science Monitor. 

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DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS: KTVU incident exposes weaknesses in a newsroom's culture - and ours

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Airline mishaps are so rare these days that safety experts tell us it usually takes a unique combination of errors - not just a single random act - to bring down a plane.   When the book is closed on the embarrassing error by  KTVU, the Fox affiliate in Oakland, on the so-called crew names from Asiana Flight 214, chances are we'll see the same pattern.  It's likely that a cascade of errors will have led to that error as well. 

So, let's stop to consider some of the root causes of silly errors that are made in newsrooms.   In KTVU's case, there are four identifiable realities that converged, in this case, to wreak havoc.  And they are by no means unique to that station. 

KTVU accidentally repeated a lowbrow joke in reporting the fictionalized names of the crew in an Asiana Airlines flight that crash landed in San Francisco.

We have to begin with one of the dirty little secrets of the news business.  Gallows humor breeds in newsrooms.   I've never worked in one where it wasn't a fact of life.  Joking is one of the coping mechanisms that journalists develop after repeated exposure to death, violence, and mayhem.  Find a way to laugh about it - and the more politically incorrect, the faster it will spread.

The second factor is the need for speed, driven largely by the minute-to-minute nature of news updates on cable networks and the Internet.  Fact checking that used to be de rigeur before air time has suffered in the face of new competition.  

The old rule was to double-verify your information before you go to air - and always, always keeping a healthy skepticism about information from third party sources, even government agencies.   "Get it first, but first get it right" is a saying I learned at the Associated Press when I was still in college.  But the fact is that many of the lines of defense that ensured "getting it right" years ago are now gone, victims to cost cutting and relentless efficiency reforms.

The third factor is is another dirty little secret - the real life work that summer interns are often assigned to do real work, not just in newsrooms but also government agencies.   Interns in the news business are mostly unpaid.  But supposedly, they are there to watch and learn.   Handing them the keys to the car before they can drive is risky business. 

And lastly, there is societal change.  There was a time when dark puns stayed largely in their environs - in the city room of a newspaper, for instance, or on the floor of a stock exchange.  The Internet, of course, has changed all that, just as it drove the need for speed.  The more outrageous the humor, the better the chances it will go viral. 

If you are lucky, you will learn those four lessons at a small newspaper or radio station early in life.  The hope is that in a small market, public harm will be minimal, and you are early enough on your career path to have those inevitable learning experiences help nurture what I call a journalist's self-censoring mechanism. 

But when you move to the big leagues, you're supposed to leave the Little League behind.  You shouldn't make mistakes like that in San Francisco. 

WHEN CEO'S SCREW UP: Dealing with public embarrassment

"When executives are on the podium, it’s theater," writes veteran speechwriter and blogger Peter W Yaremko.   "It's his or her face that everybody’s watching. The last thing a speechwriter wants to do is cause embarrassment."

The fact is, a CEO who handles embarrassment poorly only compounds the original error.  Yaremko tells a couple of on-the-mark stories to drive the point home... including the recent White House incident in which President Obama strode confidently to the podium, only to find his remarks missing from the lectern. 

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WHAT MARGARET THATCHER TAUGHT ME ABOUT NEWS

The question to ask about every story: what will it mean tomorrow?

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Newspeople have the attention span of a gnat.  We are bred to cover today's big thing, get the facts, find the story line, write, print, and move on to tomorrow's big thing.  

"Yesterday's news," as the phrase once went, "is tomorrow's fish wrap."  Or as you might say today, with a roll of your eyes and a toss of your head, "that is soooo 15 minutes ago."  

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on an official visit to Washington shortly after her election in 1979.  ​

But news is also, as longtime Washington Post publisher Philip Graham once said, the first rough draft of history.  When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died at the age of 87, I was reminded again of the difference between a routine headline and a story that people would actually remember in 30 years.

In 1979, I was the newly-minted morning news editor of WOR, New York's proud establishment radio station.  In a time well before the Internet or even cable news, WOR was one of the most listened to stations in the country, and certainly among the most profitable.   

(I was in my early 20's at the time, and the next youngest newsroom employee was almost twice my age.)    

New York was a very different place in 1979.  The city had nearly gone bankrupt just a few years before, and was only now starting to recover.   Public services like street cleaning and garbage collection were notoriously undependable.  

On one side of WOR's 23rd floor studios at 1440 Broadway - where world figures routinely came to be interviewed -Times Square was dirty, sleazy, and dangerous.   On the other side, Bryant Park was a well known location for drug deals.   Crime of all kinds was setting records.   

Then, on April 19, more than six thousand New York State prison guards went on strike, in direct violation of a law which prohibited public employees from walking off the job.   Correctional facilities were already overflowing.  Now there were palpable fears for public safety.  The National Guard was called in to man the prisons, prompting cries of "scab" and leading to violence on the picket lines.  

The prison guard strike was our lead story at WOR for the better part of sixteen days.   It felt like sixteen months.  

But on the early morning of May 4 came a surprise.  Negotiators for the state and the guards' union, working all night, unexpectedly reached an agreement to end the walkout.  The city and the state breathed an almost audible sigh of relief.   

I arrived at WOR at 4 am, and part of my job was to consult with our writers and anchors and identify the big lead story of our morning news shows, with a cumulative audience of more than a million people.

Had the strike ended on almost any other day, my choice would have been a slam dunk.  But May 4 was also the day that Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain.  

A section of the WOR Radio newsroom as it appeared  in 1979.  The editor's desk is the large "box" in the center.  At right, behind the manual typewriter, is editor Jim Yoell.   Courtesy New York Radio News.  

My team and I all debated and reflected on the pros and cons for a few minutes - something that doesn't happen very much in the news industry these days.  An end to a labor dispute that endangered the public, we decided, surely meant more to our listeners than a new leader across the sea in England.  

So we led with the prison strike.  Thatcher would be our second story.  

After the end of our first 15-minute news block at 6 am, I got a call at the desk from WOR's News Director, Reg Laite.   He had just heard our broadcast from home, and had other ideas.  

"Why are you leading with the strike?  Your lead-all has to be Thatcher," he instructed me.   "Move the end of the prison strike down to the second slot."  

I asked Laite why.  After all, we'd been leading with the prison standoff for more than two weeks.   Wasn't it just a more significant story?  

"Thatcher is bigger," he grunted.  "It's huge.  It's historic.  Maybe you're too young to see.  She is the first woman to lead a Western power.  Go with it."  

You can debate about what the right call was on that particular morning.  But history, the ultimate judge, would prove my boss correct, and me wrong. 

Remember - this was before the rest of the world had ever really heard of Margaret Thatcher.  It was before she faced down unionized coal miners, heralding a changed game for Britain's economy.  And it was well before the election of Ronald Reagan, the rise of democracy in Poland, fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism - all events in which Thatcher's resolve played a key role.

And, of course, Meryl Streep won an Oscar for portraying an iron lady - not a prison guard.   Today it seems downright silly to compare the two.  

Now, more than ever, we live in an era where moonbeams pass as news.  Now you see it, now you don't.   The lesson I took from the election of Margaret Thatcher still prompts me to ask a simple question about every story I write, and read:  

What's it gonna mean in 30 years?