You have to make a lot of tough calls in a regular, 24-hour, newsroom. I don’t envy people making those calls.
Newsrooms are under constant pressure to churn things out in the 24-hour news world, and that means they’re bound to get things wrong (as a former reporter for radio stations across the country, I’ve been there). There’s also the ongoing case of stories running without all the facts, perhaps to be added later.
Last week it was clear how tough things can be for the 24-hour newsrooms.
The recent story of police officers being swarmed by a group of teens is the kind of thing that grabs headlines, nay, creates headlines, and makes people want to watch and listen. It’s the sort of story that will fill talk radio with middle aged folks wagging their fingers, and saying it’s time to “teach young punks” some respect.
I mean, it’s not every day a police officer is assaulted (thankfully) and it touches a nerve that even those who protect us can still be vulnerable. But how do you tell this story in an even-handed way?
Because, as we all know, news isn’t a movie or television plot; in real life, things are rarely as black and white as we’d like. It’s incredibly difficult to get these stories across to the greater public in a fair way. It’s tough for a lot of crime stories, actually.
I bring this up because the accused in this swarming case is telling the Edmonton Journal police have it wrong. It’s easy to dismiss this as someone trying to defend their name. But sometimes the story does end up being very different from the initial version.
Days before this story of violence, a case of assaulting a police officer was thrown out of court by a judge. Here, the judge says the police officer went too far. It took the trial process to get more on the case. The information wasn’t readily available or provided at the headline-grabbing stage.
(Notes: The case could always be appealed and there are still other legal avenues being pursued. I’m also not linking the two stories to say this latest one will be thrown out.)
So what do you do? Do you just put up a little blurb mentioning the charges and wait for details at court?
The fear there would be that your competition will have a front page or top story all about the charges and people will wonder why you didn’t do anything more than a brief update.
Though, the days following the Journal story with the accused show that not everyone went full-out on that story. Even the Journal went from the front page with the assault allegations to page B4, with the story from the accused teen.
Another example of why newsrooms should ease up on the crime headlines (or work on the story thoroughly before publishing) is right here; this story was all about how four teens beat a man to death on an ETS bus. Turned out that’s not at all what happened. Again, things had to go to court before all the facts could be learned.
I think limiting sensational headlines (and possibly, most of the sensational story), especially when details are coming from one side, would be a start.
It would take bold newsroom decisions though. You might have to work on the story for a couple of days, watching the other guys produce stories one fact at a time, before you could give a full and/or fair balance.
It might also take some feature and in-depth reporting to make up for the lack of easy-to-cover stories. But wouldn’t it be better to have the story correct, all the way through?
