Wilson, ACORN coverage deserves some criticism ... and so do some of our readers

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press’ biennial media attitudes survey was released late last week, and the results were, to say the least, distressing for anyone in my line of work.

According to one summary of the results, the public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades, and Americans’ views of media bias and independence match previous lows.

Some of the numbers:

• 29 percent of Americans say that news organizations generally get their facts straight, down from 55 percent in the initial 1985 survey;

• 63 percent say news stories often are inaccurate, up from 34 percent in 1985;

• Republicans continue to be highly critical of the media, but Democrats are getting in on the act, too — 59 percent say media reports are inaccurate, up from 43 percent two years ago.

To be sure, media’s problem is a problem of their own making. As I’ve argued before, we have strayed from the principle of objectivity at our own peril. High-profile scandals involving Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Jack Kelley and others undermined public confidence in our accuracy and in our character. Dan Rather’s over-zealous attempt to stick it to President George W. Bush with falsified Air National Guard documents lent credence to accusations of political bias.

The Beaufort Gazette and The Island Packet are operations far removed from The New York Times, New Republic or CBS newsrooms, but we catch the same scorn — sometimes deservedly so, sometimes not. The recent juxtaposition of the controversies involving Joe Wilson, Van Jones and ACORN have provided several opportunities to talk about both kinds of instances, and I think that’s a talk worth having — in part because we need to own up to our mistakes, and in part because it needs to be pointed out that some of our critics are off base to the point of intellectual dishonesty.

Some things we have, frankly, screwed up lately

• We made three bad, front-page headline errors this week, two that appeared on the front pages of both newspapers on Tuesday, another that appeared in Wednesday’s Gazette.

The Tuesday errors were identical in nature. One dealt with a story about state and local chambers of commerce reports that potential visitors to South Carolina are canceling plans because of Wilson’s remarks during President Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 9. The headline said visitors are shunning the state because of Wilson’s “you lie” shout. That’s not quite what the story said, though — it said only that the chambers were receiving phone calls from those threatening not to come; no one in the tourism industry was cited to say whether anyone actually was following through or if bookings were even down. (Obviously, at least some of the phone calls could be placed by politically motivated people who never intended to come here in the first place, a possibility that admittedly was not raised in the story and probably should have been.) The headline would have been accurate if we attributed the statement to a source, but we did not. We made a similar mistake in a headline downpage for a story about local swine flu cases — no attribution and a slight distortion of what the story actually said.

No one called to complain about either headline, but I heard plenty about a more egregious mistake the next day. The banner headline for the Gazette’s Wilson story said he had been reprimanded by the House. In this context, however, “reprimand” has a very specific meaning, and as the story correctly pointed out, it did not apply in this case. The House merely took a vote of disapproval.

I think the mistakes were attributable to headline writers who simply didn’t read the copy closely enough. Whatever the case, our readers have every right to expect better. Mistakes happen, it’s true, but mistakes also erode a newspaper’s credibility.

• Several people complained in the past week or so about a lack of coverage of the ACORN controversies late last week and early this week. These were newsworthy events that should have appeared on our pages, no two ways about it.

Everyone who complained also asserted liberal bias. As I explained to a few of them, the omission was indeed a case of bias, just not of the political variety. For whatever reason, the Associated Press did not place ACORN coverage on the early digests it sends to subscribers each day, so we didn’t know to look for ACORN stories moving on the wire, let alone discuss how to display them during our 4 p.m. budget meetings. I’m not passing the buck — the stories moved on the wire and were available to us — but because we try to manage our time by moving inside wire pages early in the deadline cycle (our bias on these pages is for copy that we can plan for and that will move early), it is possible that a story arriving unannounced won't get the due consideration it deserves.

After readers brought the omission to our attention, we discussed the matter in Tuesday’s budget meeting and decided that for Wednesday’s paper, we would publish an ACORN story that moved a day earlier. We also sent a “what’s up with that?” note to the regional AP bureau to ask that they be more cognizant of this story and include it in its list of top stories if coverage is expected.

I believe the gripes about the headlines and the ACORN omission are fair, and all I can do is offer my apology and a vow to do better in the future.

But we’ve also received less-than-fair criticism in recent days

• Someone who did not leave their name or telephone number left me a profanity-laced voice mail message asserting we’re only making a big deal of the Wilson controversy because of our liberal bias and that the story doesn’t belong on our front page.

Really? That’s your position?

Never mind that several conservative talk radio hosts have devoted considerable air time to the Wilson controversy? Never mind that this is more than a distant national dust-up and that Wilson represents the vast majority of our readership? Never mind that seven of the top 10 “most commented” stories on our Web site (at the time I wrote this) were about Wilson? Never mind that we had received several letters to editor in defense of and in opposition to Wilson within hours of his comment and have had to make special accommodations to run scores of other letters that have arrived since?

How do you take a person like that seriously?

• Another anonymous caller said we’ve been slanting Wilson coverage, intentionally omitting ACORN news and covering up the resignation of “green jobs czar” Van Jones ... and that our obvious socialist agenda is why he quit reading us a long time ago.

• Another caller complained that we didn’t publish anything about the Washington TEA Party in Monday’s paper. But the event was held on Saturday, and we gave it play in the Sunday edition. We additionally wrote a preview about a local contingent that went to D.C. and covered a TEA Party rally in Beaufort’s Waterfront Park, also held on Saturday.

Didn’t matter. She wanted to cancel her newspaper subscription because it wasn’t in Monday’s paper, further proof of liberal bias, she said.

• In a similar vein, a recent caller complained about several national items we supposedly didn’t publish in our section, specifically accusing us of not running anything about Jones (not true, by the way). She then told me she only takes the Gazette two days a week — meaning that, at most, she reads 29 percent of our newspaper. That hardly makes her an authority on what we do and do not publish.

In fielding complaints this week, I noticed a trend. The critics who made valid points (and yes, some of them asserted liberal bias, too) expressed their disappointment, some quite pointedly, without threatening to cancel their subscriptions. The irrational arguments came from those who at some point threatened to cancel or, in a delicious stroke of idiocy, were calling to complain about something they read in a paper they simultaneously claimed to have stopped reading long ago.

This, to me, explains a lot about the attitudes revealed in the Pew survey results. On the one hand, we in this business can and should consider what our critics have to say because our own mistakes provide the rational basis for that measure of disenchantment. Unfortunately, the opinions of those long divorced from their senses probably have been measured, too.

The upshot: The Pew numbers say a lot about us, but they probably say quite a bit about our readers, too.

And it's not good on either count.

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