Tom Rosenstiel, vice chair of the Committee of Concerned Journalists delivers the 2003 Ruhl Lecture. Photo: Jack Liu

A reporter who cooked up fake stories at The New York Times also burned the public’s trust in the media, but that hasn’t made these “the worst of times” for the country’s journalists, a prominent media critic says.

Tom Rosenstiel, vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, says the consternation in newsrooms over recent revelations of fabricated stories by former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair shows that most news organizations already are setting high standards, and the affair will push reporters to do even better.
“Historically, these crises, as often as not, have resulted in higher standards for the press,” he says.

Rosenstiel delivered the School’s annual Ruhl Lecture in May. His comments on the current state of journalism were made during a meeting with reporters, editors and journalism educators at the Register-Guard.

His appearance coincided with the presentation of the school’s annual Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism. This year’s awards honored a Florida newspaper that fought off an effort by state investigators to obtain notes from a series of stories revealing problems in the state child welfare system; a Native American reporter whose investigative stories led him to conclude Indian activist Leonard Peltier is guilty of murdering an FBI agent; and the student newspaper at Mount Hood Community College, which came out against a college bond measure.

Like most other issues of the day, Rosenstiel says the Blair incident was amplified through the constant barrage of news and commentary that pours from cable television, the Internet and print media. He says that kind of coverage often makes issues seem bigger than they actually are.

“In some ways you could argue that everything today is over-covered,” he says.

That said, he believes “we’re all tarred” when reporters are caught subverting the values that most news organizations put at the center of their work. Using a twist on the old financial axiom, “bad money chases out good money,” he says the worst examples of the craft, no matter how rare, too often end up being the ones the public uses to judge the profession.

“Bad journalism kind of chases out good journalism to some extent,” he says, “in that examples of lower standards in journalism predicate what people think about us.”

The worst thing about the Blair episode, he says, was that so few of the people Blair claimed to have quoted bothered to complain that he had never interviewed them. Some later said they didn’t think anyone at the paper would listen or that they assumed that sort of thing happened all the time.

“That’s really terrible,” Rosenstiel says. “That’s a sad commentary.”

One solution, he says, is for more news organizations that stand by their codes of ethics to do more to toot their own horns and let readers and viewers know they’re being vigilant about accuracy and fairness.

“One solution is we who have higher standards have to play more like the NBA—we have to use our elbows,” he says. “We have to show people there’s a difference.”

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Editor’s Note: This story was excerpted from “Ethics leaders stand firm in shaky times,” which first appeared in The Register-Guard, May 23, 2003.