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2004 NFPW Conference
Stressing honesty, accuracy important
Preventing another Jayson Blair can be done, but it takes a lot of work, a former journalism school director said.
Blair is the former New York Times reporter who was forced to resign for plagiarism and fabricating stories. Blair, who was a reporter at the newspaper from May 1999 to June 2003, brought two of the Times’ top newsroom managers down with him. The Times had to publish an unprecedented four-page correction.
Unfortunately, Blair managed to slip through all the checks and balances that are supposed to catch those who violate journalistic ethics, according to Jo-Ann Huff Albers, director of the School of Journalism and Broadcasting at Western Kentucky University from 1987 to 2003. She shared her views of the Blair case during the recent NFPW conference in Lexington, Ky.
“Talk about someone being on a fast tract,” she said. ”Jayson Blair was on it.”
Fellow college students called him an inspiration, his professors thought he was a good student and checks with sources for stories he wrote while in college didn’t turn up any major inaccuracies, she said. However, he wasn’t close to graduating when he accepted his first job as a reporter. And later, his editors at the Times failed to give his stories the scrutiny they needed.
Albers thinks one of the first steps to keeping another incident such as this from happening is for teachers to try to instill a basic sense of honesty in their students. She said students don’t start plagiarizing suddenly when they reach college or the work world; they learn it in elementary school when teachers tell them to refer to the encyclopedia for their research but fail to mention that the students must credit the source of their information.
She said that to teach the importance of honesty, universities need to set high standards and hold their students to them; require students to attend ethics courses; have professors provide lessons on ethics, attribution, plagiarism and the importance of credibility; bring in communication professionals to reinforce the importance of those lessons; and use plagiarism detection software on their students’ work. Once students have graduated to a job in journalism, they need reliable editors who are willing to edit their copy, and newsrooms need managers who are concerned about accuracy and willing to punish editors for failing to do their jobs.
“Everybody benefits from good editing,” she said.
- Ellen Crawford
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