Whose perspective beholds the truth

Whose perspective beholds the truth in the newsroom when it comes to the story's perspective? Perhaps it’s the newspapers that hire these reporters that have the job of deciding the correct perspective. They might ask, “Does this person have the type of perspective that I can trust?” Wow, that must be a tough question to ask and certainly requires some serious self-reflection, in many directions.

To help me get into this topic, it was very helpful to find someone that could debate it with me. However, it like eating brain meatball sandwich, of course mine is dripping with all sort of thoughts that I don't know how to control and it’s embarrassing to eat in front of someone else because it is so messy. So, let’s get into it, shall we?

So, recently, I had a few e-mail exchanges with a friend of mine named Karen Defelice, who was nice enough to engage me in this topic – reporter ethics. In my point of view, accurate reporting is all in the reporter’s perception. (I would perhaps felt better debating that their boss should authenticate the angle but I took it from a different point of view to see how I could work through this one.) She wrote the following situation for me to think through and I couched this as a possible topic of ‘misappropriation of government funds.'

She writes, "A particular profession requires certain individuals to attend a conference or training program as part of maintaining their professional license. The travel days and locations were such that, although it was a legitimate working conference, the expenses on filed could be taken out of context and - with the proper spin - made to look like the professionals where skipping out on work and enjoying a luxurious vacation on company $$, or on the taxpayer's dime. How does the journalist, or reader, differentiate exposing wasteful spending from distorting the truth of the events?"

Clearly, this is no easy topic for me to sort through but is in fact, a real situation faced by many reporters. Kyle Elyse Niederpruem, president of Kyle Communications, Inc., writes, “More than half of reporters surveyed by the Medill School of Journalism said an unethical or unprofessional incident occurred in their newsrooms in the past five years. Shocking? Not Hardly”

Wow, I'm gambling that this is a daily issue for reporters and their bosses. I'm going to assert that the few bad reporters are far out numbers ethical ones. Clearly, I can justify absent guidance and connect this to the immediate supervisor. Perhaps, another boss in their chain? I was even tempted to pin-it on a mentoring program that failed to train them for the situation. But I found my self owning up to the point that I don’t know. I was clearly out of my element on this one - there are all sorts of ways to justify a wrong point of view in a newsroom.

So, once again, perhaps it’s the people that interview and hire these people that have the real work ahead of themselves. Better yet, it could it be the editors who must raise the red flag when something is wrong. Who has the right perspective for a story before its printed?

Thanks Karen....