Seattle Post-Intelligencer misses opportunity to demonstrate transparency; instead, it insists Washington News Council is "out to get" the paper

A sad tableau is playing itself out in Seattle, home base of the Washington News Council.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a major newspaper in the state, has published a multi-year series about alleged lapses of internal discipline in the local county sheriff’s office. The sheriff filed a complaint with the News Council; because the parties have not resolved the complaint, it may be scheduled for a News Council public hearing.

The newspaper has announced it will not participate and has accused the News Council of bias, saying that four of its voting members have contributed money to the sheriff’s election campaign, and that the Council’s executive director is married to a woman who works for the previous sheriff, now a Congressman.

Beyond deciding it will not participate, the newspaper has filed legal papers seeking copies of all correspondence on this matter between the News Council and the sheriff’s office and the previous sheriff’s congressional office.

Unlike the situation in Minnesota, where almost all news outlets participate willingly in the News Council’s public hearings and forums on standards of journalistic fairness, in Washington the major media have generally chosen not to participate in the proceedings of the Washington News Council. They have not attended hearings, although in every case they have responded in detail to the complaints, with copies to the WNC.

The Post-Intelligencer says it will deal with the complaint by publishing the full text of the complaint, plus the newspaper’s response, on its Internet web site.

Two Seattle reporters have called me in the past few days to ask what the Minnesota News Council’s policies are regarding political preferences of the Council’s voting members and what we do about conflicts of interest, real or perceived.

This is what I told them: When we consider applications for membership on the News Council’s hearing panel, we never ask applicants what their politics are. All we want to know is what they believe the role of the news media should be in a democracy and if they believe that the exercise of freedom of the press carries with it the responsibility to meet high standards for accuracy and fairness.

The Washington News Council and its executive director share the philosophy by which we in Minnesota operate: that we are passionately detached from the outcome of complaint hearings, but passionately attached to the fairness of the process. And like Minnesota, the Washington News Council does not ask prospective members about their politics - although it seeks broad diversity among its membership.

Any member of the hearing panel with a conflict of interest is asked to attend the hearing and, before it starts, publicly announce his or her recusal. In the case of Northwest Airlines’ complaint against WCCO-TV, in 1996, the television station objected to the participation of a News Council member who was public relations director for the Minneapolis Police Department. The station said its relationship with her was strained, and it wanted her excluded. She promptly recused herself.

At a hearing on a complaint by the St. Paul Port Authority against City Pages, a hearing-panel member recused herself at the start, saying she was a close friend of a Port Authority executive.

A television news manager called me one day to ask why one of our panel members was conducting an independent investigation of a complaint, going beyond information the News Council staff was providing all members. The manager was right to ask: we have a policy forbidding such individual digging, and we told the member that he had to choose between being an investigator and serving on the News Council. He chose to drop his investigation.

I believe that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is wasting an opportunity to offer the public the same transparency it demands of all other institutions in its community, including the sheriff’s office.

I also believe that the Washington News Council should make all its questioned correspondence records available to the newspaper and the public, thereby demonstrating its transparency and neutrality on this complaint and shifting accountability back to the newspaper.

If it becomes clear that the News Council is impartial, then the newspaper should have no objection to taking part in a hearing. If it persists in refusing, then people will be justified in asking what the newspaper is afraid of.

After all, news council determinations carry no sanctions; they serve well, however, in encouraging conversations that lead to both better journalism and greater public understanding of the role of the press in our society.

Death of Rosenthal, possible birth of new news councils an ironic coincidence

The former executive editor of The New York Times, Abe Rosenthal, died this week. The Times distinguished itself by running a long obituary news story on his life and career in which the newspaper boldly listed both his journalistic gifts and his often destructive personality. The newspaper acknowledged that he made careers for favorites and destroyed careers of staffers who offended him.

Rosenthal condemned the idea of news councils, and he mocked the work of the National News Council, which died in the early 1980s because The Times, The Washington Post, NBC News and ABC News refused to participate in its accountability process. Rosenthal called a news council "the camel’s nose under the tent and the first step toward government control of the press."

He was a great reporter, but he got that one wrong. News councils avoid anything to do with government, including taking money from it; their goal is to help news outlets gain enough public trust so that the public will rebuff any government attempt to interfere with freedom of the press.

Rosenthal’s death occurs within weeks of the possible creation of new news councils. Two existing news councils, in Minnesota and in Washington state, are conducting a national competition in which groups wanting to start a news council elsewhere can receive $75,000 grants to do so, funded by The Knight Foundation. Applications are due May 15, and winners will be announced within a month.

The mission of news councils is to engage the press and the public in public conversations about standards of fairness. Sometimes that engagement takes the form of a public hearing on an unresolved complaint, on which the complainant waives the right to sue. The hearing panel, composed equally of journalists and non-journalists, issues a non-binding determination that is widely published. In Minnesota’s 36 years of conducting hearings, half the complaints heard have been upheld and half denied. The determinations generate conversations that tend to empower the public to demand high standards and that encourage news outlets to become more open and thus earn trust.

Perhaps Abe Rosenthal never envisioned the upheavals and harm to journalism that the Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley and Dan Rather scandals have produced, and never envisioned the day The Times would have an ombudsman, a Public Editor. News outlets across the country have, as a result, wisely been striving to become more open. I wish I knew what Rosenthal thought about these things in his final days.

Gary Gilson, Executive Director, Minnesota News Council

Let’s say Katie Couric does occupy the Dan Rather/Walter Cronkite seat on the CBS Evening News. What difference will it make - to viewers, to the organization, to journalism?

Couric is a specialty act: the perky gal next door, at ease in all kinds of situations, as she demonstrated so well on NBC’s Today Show. But perkiness does not a news anchor make, and if she tones it down to achieve gravitas, isn’t she leaving her game in the locker room?

In other words, if you take the Katie out of the Couric, are you left with just another news reader, perhaps not as good as dozens of others might be?

And if you leave the Katie in, how long before the luster of celebrity begins to fade?

The thing that can rescue network TV news - or at least delay its demise - is reporting: original reporting on stories that truly matter in people’s daily lives. Stories about health care policy, money, war and peace, education, jobs, housing, child-rearing, globalization. Interpretive reporting that explains what’s at stake, what factors are influencing outcomes and how people can get involved.

Above all, news professionals have to go back to questioning those who wield power, no matter what the field. Too many reporters and editors have been supine in recent times, and their lack of assertiveness has allowed those in power to escape accountability.

And while the news media are at it, they need to embrace every opportunity themselves to become accountable to the public for the accuracy and fairness of their reporting.

-Gary Gilson, Minnesota News Council

By Gary Gilson, Executive Director

Editors of mainstream news outlets have often been heard saying they want their reporters to write "with attitude." But try to find many examples of it.

Now comes David Carr of The New York Times (who used to be editor of the Twin Cities Reader), a reporter and Monday Business Page columnist who specializes in media stories, with a report this week on the choice of a new editor for The New Republic magazine, an insider named Franklin Foer.

The story exudes attitude. I say "exudes" rather than "reeks with" because I loved reading it. No matter if you care not a whit about The New Republic or if you have never heard of Franklin Foer.

For me Carr’s telling of the story IS the story. It was a straight news story, not a column, and it was a bit of a shock to read it in The Times. Here’s how it started:

"For a small outfit, The New Republic has always gone long on drama. Its changes in leadership have usually arrived in the form of rolling coups or lightning bolts from above. So it is refreshing, if a bit underwhelming, to report that Franklin Foer, a senior editor with the magazine, is quietly taking over the shop next week from the current editor, Peter Beinart . . . "

After describing the magazine’s financial losses in recent years, Carr goes on to say, "Meanwhile, its historical role as a maypole for middle-way Democrats is under challenge from countless Web sites and bloggers. And one of the magazine’s major preoccupations - a search for the soul of the Democratic Party - would seem to require a lot of patience and a miner’s helmet."

As director of the News Council I do not express opinions about the issues that come before it, and I do not participate in hearings or vote on determinations. My opinion is my own. It seems to me that people interested in journalistic standards could have a rich discussion about objectivity if they focused on a story such as Carr’s.

What I loved about Carr’s storytelling was the fact that he convinced me that he KNEW what he was talking about and he TOLD us, instead of hiding behind the journalistic convention of having to attribute every idea to some authoritative source.

The fact that David Carr is a savvy reporter and witty thinker and writer makes the reading of his story delightful, and the text does not come across to me as either gossipy or gratuitous.

The debate has gone on for years about whether news organizations should allow reporters to write what they know.

Maybe this seeming relaxation of the rules at The Times signals a sea change for that newspaper and for the news business.

Let us hear from you. What do you think about reporters telling what they know, as opposed to being restricted to telling us what others want us to know?

The death of Peter Jennings brings to mind a superb 1990 book, "Anchors," which describes the world of network television news by focusing on Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather working on high-profile stories.

The book, by Robert Goldberg, then the Wall Street Journal TV and media critic, and his father, Gerald Jay Goldberg, a college professor, was published by Carol Publishing Group, Secaucus, New Jersey:

It focuses on such events as the confrontation in Tiananmen Square and the most recent San Francisco earthquake disaster, and it vividly portrays the decision-making, economics, energy, internal politics, personalities and competitiveness that go into network coverage of major news stories.

How we got started:
In the late 1960s the Minnesota Newspaper Association recognized that public trust in the news media was declining. The association, which represents the interests of about 385 papers across the state (25 or so of them dailies, most of the rest weeklies), dispatched a University of Minnesota journalism professor, Ed Gerald, to study the work of the British Press Council in London. He was impressed with its ability to resolve complaints and to restore public trust, and he came back urging the association to start a news council here.

It would have 24 voting members, half of them journalists and half laypersons, and a sitting justice of the state supreme court as chairperson at public hearings on unresolved complaints. The Minnesota News Council was incorporated in
December 1970 and heard its first case in January 1971. It upheld the complaint of a legislator who said the Union Advocate newspaper had unfairly described him as being on the take from the liquor lobby. At the hearing the editor admitted that he had not checked the veracity of the story because it was good a story to lose. Few of the cases since have proved so easy.