How Local News Can Avoid A Credibility Crisis

With erroneous reporting seemingly on the rise, industry leaders say local TV news operations need to make getting the facts straight a top priority this year if the medium is to stay credible.

“What it boils down to is doing your job — whatever your responsibility is — and that’s checking your sources,” says RTDNA Executive Director Mike Cavender.  “It’s no more complex than that.”

Although vetting information is a core — and utterly basic — component of all kinds of journalism, the accuracy of broadcast news has recently waned, some observers claim.

Critics panned affiliates’ news teams for reporting incorrect information during their wall-to-wall coverage of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. At one point, news teams wrongly identified the shooter as his brother; they also said the shooter’s mother worked at school where the rampage occurred.

During Hurricane Sandy, journalists reported events that never happened — Con Edison workers trapped in a power station and a preemptive power shutdown across Manhattan — based on a hedge fund analyst’s bogus Tweets.

In 2011, Texas TV stations (as well as national media) reported police finding dozens of bodies, including children, in a mass grave in Liberty County, Texas. Not only was that information wrong, but it was based on a tip called in by someone who claimed to be psychic.

“It’s bad for the profession but, more importantly, it’s bad for those counting on us to get the real facts,” Cavender says.

Industry insiders see a range of culprits behind what they say is broadcasters’ waning attention to detail — most related one way or another to the emergence of new media.

The demand to continually crank out content for multiple platforms, just part of the new 24-hour news cycle, is taking its toll on the usual vetting process, they say. So is the massive amount of incorrect information circulated online and via social media, which TV news operations sometimes repurpose, usually on digital platforms, assuming that it is true.

The nuts and bolts of managing technology is also a contributor, news executives say.

Behind the scenes, stations having, say, just one or two-person digital teams managing content on a myriad of platforms — websites, social media, email alerts and Smartphone apps, for example — gives those people very little time to spend on confirming content, says Barb Palser, a VP at St. Paul, Minn.-based Internet Broadcasting.

Deciding whether to use information that, for instance, comes in via Twitter but has a seemingly credible source is tough when time is tight, she says.  “The judgment calls become a lot more difficult.”

“They are trying to do that in a high pressure situation where information and misinformation is flying all over the place,” Palser says. “That is where stations will be challenged.”

As Cavender puts it, “I fear that too often the technology has driven the journalism rather than the other way around. And that’s never a good situation.”

Yet you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’d say any of those conditions are reason enough to get things wrong.

The way Poynter’s Al Tompkins sees things, the accuracy-related issues challenging TV journalists today are no different than they were at any other point in broadcast history — and blaming changes in the industry is a “cop-out.”

For decades, news radio has demonstrated broadcasters’ ability to keep up with the demand of a nonstop news medium, he says. “There is nothing new about instant or faster reporting.”

“Brevity and speed are not excuses to forgo accuracy and attribution,” Tompkins says. The preponderance of incorrect information doesn’t cut it either. “There has been misinformation as long as there have been barber shops,” he says.

What is problematic, though, is the tendency to treat digital and on-air content differently, holding the former to a lesser standard, says Tompkins. Tompkins was part of an RTDNA committee that several years ago developed guidelines calling on journalists to apply the same standards of accuracy and integrity to all content, regardless of its platform.

Remedying the problem starts in newsrooms, he says. “What we need to have are new conversations about journalistic values and what are we willing to attach our names to.”

Cavender agrees. “It’s even more important now that newsrooms have standards that they adhere to, and that people take the time to check and recheck before putting that information out on their own platforms,” he says. “It’s sorting out fact from fiction and accuracy from inaccuracy.”

Palser envisions a greater number of stations adopting policies that regulate the use of information that is in “the public space” and user-generated content. Broadcasters also need to expand their digital teams and improve — most notably by streamlining — the range of platforms they oversee to be efficient and effective, she says.

Todd Mokhtari, VP of news at NBC-owned KNBC Los Angeles, says there is no excuse for a decline in newsroom standards, regardless of whether information comes in through avenues like the Internet or over the telephone like it used to.

The process before using such information still includes basics like confirming it with multiple sources, or at least a single source with proven credibility.

Unconfirmed information that comes through multiple Tweets, for example, could be used under the right circumstances — but only if the station reporting it makes clear that the news has not been officially corroborated, Mokhtari says.

“You’re presenting the best available information, and that information may be 10 people Tweeting. That’s no different than [what] we would [do] in the past, it’s just a different medium,” he says. “And sometimes the best information changes later.”

On the upside, Mokhtari sees the huge amount of erroneous information circulating on digital media as a potential opportunity for local TV news. By getting their stories straight, broadcast journalists and the organizations they represent could reinforce their validity by standing apart from the pack.

“As journalists, we should be happy about it because it makes our information more valuable,” he says.

That may be so. But Cavender says there have been enough mishaps over the last year or so that TV newsrooms need to seriously clamp down on the problem, since the number of people who circulate bad information will only grow.

“We are never going to control people who have all sorts of reasons, good or bad, to do this,” Cavender says. “But what we can control is our ability to verify and vet.”

Read other Air Check columns here. You can send suggestions for future Air Checks to Diana Marszalek at [email protected].