Big Media: Getting it wrong, letting it slide

Getting it wrong, letting it slide
Posted on Mon, Oct. 15, 2007
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BY EDWARD WASSERMAN
edward_wasserman@hotmail.com

Why is it that the mightier the news organization, the likelier it will stand by ethical blunders that would shame a first-year reporter? Apparently, along with industrial mastery comes the right to deny, evade, whine and nitpick instead of owning up to what you did wrong and making sure you don't do it again.

Today's first case involves The New York Times Sunday Magazine and concerns allegations of gross distortions in what appear to be verbatim interviews. The second concerns CBS News Sunday Morning and as flagrant a conflict of interest as I can recall in network news. What's galling in both cases isn't the wrongdoing; it's the preposterous insistence that there was none.

The Times magazine runs a regular Q&A feature titled ''Questions for,'' handled by a seasoned journalist named Deborah Solomon. Solomon's interviewing is sharp and nimble, a little snarky, and her questions seem to flow from her subject's responses.

Despite the column's title, however, some of her subjects say questions they're apparently answering in print aren't ones they were asked, and things they said were sliced, reshuffled and published out of sequence and out of context. While reporting a profile of Solomon, a writer for the New York Press, a Manhattan alternative paper, stumbled onto some seriously disgruntled interviewees. (See wwwnypress.com/20/40/news& columns/feature.cfm.)

Among them was Amy Dickinson, who took over the advice column formerly written by Ann Landers, and Ira Glass, creator of Public Radio International's This American Life. Glass said Solomon ignored lavish compliments for his new patrons at Showtime TV and carved out a minor comment that belittled them and embarrassed him.

Those weren't the first complaints. A year before, NBC News heavyweight Tim Russert complained that the published version of his Mother's Day interview was ''misleading, callous and hurtful,'' and inaccurately had him extolling his father at the expense of his mother, who had recently died.

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http://www.miamiherald.com/430/story/271893.html