Post Ombudsman Misconstrues "Rumor"
Deborah Howell, ombudsman for the Washington Post, gets off to a rocky start in her Sunday column about the recent rumor article about Barack Obama: “Stories about rumors are tricky and easily misconstrued.”
This is a true statement. But the reason it is true should make Howell cringe. News articles about rumors are easily misconstrued because rumors are stories or statements in ”general circulation without confirmation or certainty as to facts.” So how can a news article about a rumor ever be anything but misconstrued?
Here’s what I said recently about reporting rumors:
So a rumor is a starting point for a journalism that gathers and reports the facts. Journalism, then, is (or should be) a rumor-destroying practice. Another way to put this: No responsible, legitimate journalism should ever be about rumors.
Journalism fails its primary purpose (articulated here and echoed here) to help people be free and self-governing when it fails to report facts (and report how it knows the facts are facts).
Tag: journalism
Tag: rhetoric
Tag: politics
