Stop the Presses: False Information and Graphic Images in Journalism     

 

Step 1:  When False Information Is Printed as News 

Read the article entitled “Stop the Presses!” 

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A Night for 'Stop the Presses!'
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

The New York Times   January 5, 2006

From New York to Los Angeles, anxious editors on Wednesday morning uttered one of the most legendary but rarely used phrases in the news business: Stop the presses!

Most papers across the country were reporting in their Wednesday editions that the miners trapped in a West Virginia coal mine had been found alive. When they learned the truth around 3 a.m. Eastern time, that all of the miners except one were in fact dead, many papers in the east had finished their press runs, and those westward were nearing their close.

Yesterday, the reality of the miners' deaths forced a round of self-reflection in newsrooms about how they got the story so wrong. And many editors said they planned to write explanations in their Thursday papers.

But in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the reality of those deaths forced news executives to make split-second decisions to try to get the truth to their readers.

"What makes it frightening is to know at midnight that you have a paper going out to people that is flat-out wrong," said Scott Kraft, the national editor at The Los Angeles Times. "Whoever's fault it is, right then, it's not that relevant."

When news of the deaths broke around midnight Pacific time, 200,000 copies of The Los Angeles Times were already in delivery trucks on their way to their destinations. The presses were stopped, the drivers were called on their cell phones and ordered to turn around and head back to Los Angeles.

Those papers were dumped back at the plant, where they would be recycled. While the story was rewritten, more than 4,500 people on the printing and distribution end were redeployed, said Jack Klunder, senior vice president for circulation. In the end, Mr. Kraft said, all the papers that The Los Angeles Times printed and sent out were correct.

The Daily News in New York, which normally prints four editions, put out an extra.

"Go ahead and shut them down," Robert Shields, the executive news editor, said into the phone at 2:48 a.m. to the foreman at the paper's printing plant. The order stopped the presses in the middle of the fourth edition, allowing the editors to replate the paper and print at least 160,000 more copies with the correct headline.

Crews from the Daily News also fanned out across Manhattan to remove the incorrect papers from newsstands and boxes in places like Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station. They replaced 43,000 incorrect papers with new ones.

Over at the New York Post, which is printed until 4:30 a.m., Col Allan, the editor, was barking the same orders. He was home asleep and had been awakened by a call around midnight saying the miners were alive. He gave instructions for the front page ("ALIVE!"), then went back to sleep. When he was called again around 2:50 a.m., he said, "I thought I was having a bad dream."

The Post, which was at the tail end of its press run, managed to make about 80,000 papers with a headline reflecting the confusion: "CHAOS."

At The New York Times, the final copies of the last edition had already rolled off the presses at the paper's printing plant in Queens at 2:33 a.m. and the plant in Edison, N.J., at 2:47 a.m.

At the paper's Web site, Joao Costa, the evening editor, was ending his shift and glanced at CNN.

"We see a frantic woman running toward Anderson Cooper and we were a little confused about what was happening," he said, referring to the CNN newsman. Mr. Costa said he waited until a briefing from the coal company about 3:15 a.m. before putting a new story from the Associated Press up on The Times's Web site.

In Pittsburgh, also on East Coast time, the Post-Gazette was giving the story big treatment, with its own reporters on the scene, because of its proximity to the accident (about 100 miles) and because of coal's importance to the region.

"This was an extraordinary story that merited extraordinary measures," David Shribman, the editor, said of his decision to stop the presses when he was called at home at 3 a.m. The Post-Gazette caught about half of its papers. The staff-written story was continually updated on the Web site between about 3 and 5 a.m.

Farther west, it was a little easier to catch more papers.

"We literally stopped the presses," said George de Lama, deputy managing editor for news at The Chicago Tribune. Already, 373,000 papers had gone out. But 22,000 papers with the wrong story were sitting in trucks at the loading dock. Those papers were unloaded from the trucks, and the paper printed 261,000 more with the correct version.

"In general, we all could have been stronger with attribution, especially in the headlines,'' Mr. de Lama said. "But this came at the worst possible time, right at deadline, and everyone at the scene was swept up in the euphoria. I'm sorry we got caught up in it too."

Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, which studies issues in journalism, concluded that while reporters had been quoting the families and state officials saying the miners were alive, no one seemed to have asked the basic question: How do you know?

"No one could say exactly who said they were alive," she said. "Our tendency in a crisis is to think that someone with a title is infallible. It's human instinct to want to rely on them. But it's journalistic instinct to question even further."

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Discuss the following as a class:

Questions from The New York Times Daily Lesson Plans.

 

a. What does 'stop the presses' mean?

b. Why did newspapers have to reprint the first editions of the newspapers they sent to print on the morning of January 4?
c. What information did they initially print and what was the correct information?
d. How did Joao Costa learn about the mistake?
e. Around what time did the correct information reach newspapers on the East Coast?
f. Why did newspapers on the West Coast have an easier time correcting the mistake?
g. What steps did the various newspapers take to correct their mistakes?
h. According to the article, how many newspapers had to be discarded or recycled?
i. Why was the article slated for a front page headline?
j. Why might front page status necessitate an immediate correction?
k. How does George de Lama suggest the problem might have been avoided?
l. What single question does Kelly McBride suggest would have avoided inaccurate reports?
m. Why might someone with a title be considered infallible?    

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Step Two.  Explain the misinformation published in the newspaper in the famous photograph below.

Use the internet to find your answers.  Be sure to answer the 5 W’s and H of the situation.

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Step 3:  Misinformation and Broadcast Journalism  As you know, there are fewer newspaper in circulation today than there were 100 years ago.  That is at least partly due to the fact that news can be accessed instantly on 24 hour cable news channels and the internet.  Whereas print journalists have until the first morning printing to verify their facts, broadcast journalists are often handed a breaking story to read immediately.  Facts often change as more information becomes available.  Inevitably, news channels sometimes broadcast information that is later disproved.

Read the following summary of the network coverage of the 2000 election results.

The Election of 2000

In a well-planned paragraph, explain how the media called the election prematurely twice in one night. When was the issue finally resolved?

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The Internet and the 2000 Election

Think back to the year 2000. You were in 5th, 6th, or 7th grade at the time. If you used the internet at the time, it was undoubtedly much slower (I can hear the sound of the modem connecting in my mind as I write this) and more rudimentary than it is today. For one of the first times in history, people turned in droves to the internet to provide them even faster coverage than the network news could. Network television wasn't the only news source to be wrong that night.

Read "Internet sizzes and fizzles with election coverage" from the CNN Archives.

With a partner, discuss the following:

--As a society, have we become too impatient? In other words, are journalists just trying to cater to the desire of people to have instant gratification?

--Is the internet an appropriate medium for covering election returns, or should people wait until newspapers have verified the results?

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Step 4: You Can't Show That on Television!

Hastily written stories and misinformation are not the only pitfall that comes with airing news live on television.  Sometimes cameras capture graphic and upsetting images. 

           If you watch the news live, you will see things that the networks will choose never to play again.  If the networks thought the images were too upsetting to show again, should they have had checks in place to make sure that they didn’t show them to begin with?

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Class Discussion Question:  Should news channels censor what they show?  If they should, where do they draw the line?  Is it ok to show people’s deaths as long as the people are not visible (as in a plane crashing)?  Is it ok to show blood and gore as long as the person in question didn’t die? 

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Read the article entitled “BBC delay on sensitive live news.”  Answer the following questions in complete sentences.

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1.  What story did the BBC and other TV networks air in September of 2004 that led the BBC to change its live news policy?

2.  What guidelines has the BBC established to make sure that graphic images are not broadcast live?

3.  Should American networks adopt the same guidelines?  Why or why not?

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Now visit the following sites.  If you were a producer for a news channel, would you have aired the following images?

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•  Jet Blue Emergency Landing     The people on the plane watched their crippled plane flying live on television. 

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1.  If the jet had crashed, people would have watched the passengers die on live television.  Does the network have a moral obligation to keep those images off the air so that the loved ones of the passengers or the passengers themselves do not have to watch it?

2.  Do you think the captain and/or airline should have turned off the news?

3.  As a news producer, would you have broadcast the footage live?

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• September 11, 2001

The networks replayed the images of the towers falling and the planes crashing over and over after September 11, but they chose not to replay images of people jumping from the towers to escape the inferno within.

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4.  Is it too graphic to show the towers falling or planes crashing when we know that the result is that thousands of people died?

5.  Why is the image of one or two people jumping more disturbing than the scenes mentioned in question 4, in which many more people died?

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• Covering death, live from the Wits Journalism and the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism in South Africa

6.  Was the Post right in its headline description of the incident as suicide?

7.  Was it appropriate to cover the tragedy live? Was it appropriate to run a picture spread of Lungu's fall?

8.  Should the journalists have ignored the story, or were there alternatives?

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You can access the original Zambia Post article here: 

Cops, fire brigade fail to save man from committing suicide

Enter "post" as both the username and password to access the article.

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Link broken as of 1/13/06 The text is here:

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The Post Newspaper

Cops, fire brigade fail to save man from committing suicide
By Sandra Lombe: Monday September 19, 2005   

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A COMBINED team of fire brigade, medical personnel and Zambia Police yesterday failed to save a 27-year-old Lusaka teacher, Pathias Lungu, after he climbed about 30-meters on a mast at Avondale's Lusaka Water and Sewerage Company (LWSC) facility.
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Scores of Lusaka residents watched as Lungu who had been on the mast from about 08:00 hours in the morning until his death at about 16:10 hours.
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The Lusaka fire brigade team that arrived at the scene after 14:00 hours did not have the ladder to bring Lungu down but only managed to take a bottle of water, which he did not take, about 18 meters away from where he was.
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Zambia Air Force could not release its chopper to help save Lungu. According to Lunguâ's elder sister, Mary Banda, her brother had in the past three weeks developed a withdrawal from people and claimed that some people were after his life.
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Banda said Lungu yesterday morning stopped her from going for work saying people would kill her.
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"I left for work at 08:00 hours but later I was called that Lungu had climbed the mast and wanted to kill himself. When I came back I called the council but they said they did not have the facility to bring him down. Fire brigade said they could only be here after 13:00 hours. The National Airport rescue team also said they would be here soon but up to now they have not come. The police say they can't do anything," she said.
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But around 16:00 the team decided to tie a rope to a tree through the mast and to the fire brigade vehicle with the hope of saving him but the mast bent and Lungu fell down.
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Lungu was rushed to the University Teaching Hospital's Brought In Dead (BID) section.
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Hospital public relations officer Kennedy Makukula confirmed that Lungu had been taken as a BID.
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Lungu was a teacher at Mount Moriah in Lusaka's Northmead. Some teachers from his school had gone to plead with him while his relatives went into their nearby house to pray for him so that he could climb down although all the efforts were in vain.