NOTW Scandal Shows How Not to Chase a Story
Heath E Combs -- Furniture Today, August 3, 2011
Heath E. Combs Staff writer
Furniture/Today is not the News of the World, the 168-year-old paper whose untimely death came this month from falling on its sword to save a former editor.
But at F/T, like at all good newspapers, we know how to follow a scent. And, like the old saying, even a blind pig comes across a kernel of corn every now and again.
I'd imagine that every once in a while a story from us comes across your e-mail under the "Breaking News" banner that you weren't expecting. These stories often start with a tip and several follow up interviews or documentation to back them up.
This is more complicated than it sounds. Relationships between homo sapiens are complicated. Business trade papers rely on their name and the good will of their readership for stories.
It would be a whole lot easier to pay sources for stories. But frankly, it's not in our budget right now (joke).
The NOTW scandal is a train wreck of poetic justice. A man whose big scoops came from reporters acting like rogue CIA operatives now drowns in a river of ink.
You can tell newspapers like the New York Times are treading carefully in these waters. That paper, where Jayson Blair and his fictional reporting thrived, must be careful showing it relishes the fall of the man who this side of the Atlantic gave us Fox News.
Most journalists call that network a decidedly unfair and unbalanced one that plays on ignorance and base emotions. Its pundits often work their way back from a conclusion.
That's why you don't see the mainstream press throwing News Corp. any lifeline. Yeah, nobody. Did the NOTW not realize how juicy its own internal newspaper scandal story was?
Maybe former NOTW editor Rebekah Brooks did not know who the sources of her stories were. At F/T, the name of the editor in chief is at the top of the masthead. He wants to know the source of any big story - trust me.
I can't remember a darned thing they taught us in college about journalism ethics other than print a correction if you're wrong. We never learned not to hack the phone of a missing schoolgirl or the royals or any other family - your own humanity should teach that.
A professor who'd won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Vietnam War told us that "back in the old days" he once posed as a priest to gain access to victims of a fire to get a story. I hope he wasn't teaching my ethics class.
Sometimes the news business seems a little unethical, I know. But as we're seeing now, how you gather news is just as important as what you print.
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