SUMMER 2013
Adviser Update
Page 5A
Get it fast, but get it right
By Richard J. Levine
O
news organizations. Nor was
inaccurate reporting a monopoly of the legacy media. As
David Carr, the New York
Times’ media columnist,
observed: “A crowd-sourced
witch hunt took place on Reddit, identifying innocents as
suspects, and Twitter was
alive with both misinformation
and outrage at the mistakes,”
A particularly embarrassing
incident involved Howard
Kurtz, for years one of the
nation’s most prominent
media reporters. Kurtz “parted
company” from the Daily
Beast after he incorrectly
reported that NBA player
Jason Collins had failed to
mention in a Sports Illustrated
story, in which he came out as
gay, that he had previously
been engaged to a woman. “I
screwed up,” Kurtz admitted
on Reliable Sources, his CNN
show.
All of this is occurring in a
period when media credibility
black
P01.V52.I4
is president of the board of directors of the Dow Jones News Fund Inc. In
five decades with Dow Jones & Co., he has served as vice president for
news and staff development, executive editor of Dow Jones Newswires,
vice president of information services, editorial director of electronic publishing and Washington correspondent and columnist for The Wall Street
Journal. He holds a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.S. from the
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He can be reached
at [email protected].
At the Washington Post,
Martin Baron, the new executive editor, told the National
Journal, “You have to be willing to sacrifice traffic in favor
of accuracy.
“Readers think these days
that all information is available
instantaneously, and the truth
is that not all information is
available instantaneously,”
Baron added. “You actually
need some time to check
things out. They expect that
you’re going to have it right
away, but they’ll hold you
accountable if you get it
wrong.”
Indeed, accurate reporting
is so critical to self-government that President Obama
felt compelled to weigh in on
the issue during and after the
Boston story, first warning the
news media to avoid the
temptation to “jump to conclusions” and then offering praise
for the overall effort.
At this year’s White House
Correspondents Association
Dinner, he said: “We also saw
journalists at their best—especially those who took the time
to wade upstream through th B