* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
When my fellow trainee Aidila Razak found critical rings circling her sentence structure, word usage and source selection on her first news exercise on the Editorial Judgment training program, she was shocked.
“My goodness, I’ve been writing these for five years,” said Razak, who was recently promoted to assistant editor at the Malaysian news website Malaysiakini after working as a reporter for five years.
“Obviously, it’s wrong,” she said.
Razak was not the only trainee who found her everyday practice set off red lights at the workshop. A dozen senior journalists from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, India and Malaysia, selected from 60 applicants for the five-day training program organized by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the Chinese University of Hong Kong on its campus in late November, might equally well have been tricked by veteran journalists and trainers Keith Stafford and Benjamin Lim.
“I still can’t believe I fell for the hoax,” said Nishanth Vasudevan, a 12-year stock market reporter currently with the Indian newspaper The Economic Times, referring to a news exercise where trainees worked in groups of three, receiving breaking news feeds on a school meal poisoning incident.
The poisoning case, taking place in the imaginary country of “Manchukistan” but based on true news events, had all the newsy elements a reporter could dream of: A dozen sick children on the first day, more sick children the next day, angry parents, two countries with trading relations, a listed company exporting school drinks, rumors of rat poison in factories, health officials halting production, a bottle of poison found in a company manager’s office…
While we were struggling to piece together these news feeds, flooding in from a dozen sources, a press release came in, announcing a merger decision by the listed beverage company involved in the case.
Vasudevan decided to approach his story from a finance angle, though he did notice three spelling mistakes in the press release.
“When you get something as juicy as that, you get the reporter’s excitement and you just go for it,” said Vasudevan.
But he never expected the press release to be a fake.
Vasudevan later learned it was a hoax set up by our trainer Keith Stafford, who tried to show his students that individuals or organizations can sometimes stage news events to embarrass news organizations or pursue their own agenda.
Vasudevan said that in real life he would never report anything based only on a press release but would always call several sources for confirmation. However, life could be very tough when he faced pressure from his deadline, news organization, the people he reported on and the exclusive stories that sometimes come from a single source. But he did learn something from the hoax.
“Never trust anything blindly,” Vasudevan said.
Also reflecting on “trust” is Huang Qingming, a seven-year reporter working for City Express, a newspaper in China’s southeast city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province.
Huang said he wanted to take a game we played during the workshop to his colleagues back home. We were divided into pairs, sitting back to back. One was given a cartoon image, and the other had to ask for his or her partner’s description of the image and draw a copy without looking at the original.
Huang drew the shape of the cartoon correctly, but the size of its body parts was distorted. “I wanted to show my colleagues that this is the problem telephone interviews can create,” he said.
Starting at a small county newspaper, Huang worked his way up to a metro paper with a circulation of one million. The large readership meant less time to do legwork but more telephone calls in the newsroom. “I cultivated more networks and sources when I was working for a small paper,” Huang said. At his metro paper, “we wasted a lot of time waiting for official announcements on their websites or micro blogs rather than digging for information by ourselves.”
For Hong Kong journalists, the workshop was taking place at an unusual time. Thousands of protesters had been occupying the streets near the government headquarters for two months, demanding a revised law to elect the region’s chief executive.
Mingchuen Kwan, a TV documentary producer at Television Radio Hong Kong, said she and many colleagues felt strongly about the movement, and some had changed their profile pictures on social networks to express their political stand. Kwan said she understood that there was no privacy for journalists on social media, because everything they said could be interpreted as representing their media organizations. Still, putting aside their emotions and attitudes was much harder said than done.
“We are human first. Journalism is our job,” Kwan said. “How about ‘me’ after work?” she asked – a question with no right or wrong answer.
Journalists face many ethical questions every day – when there is no law barring us from, for example, being emotional, gaining people’s trust to find out information, or sacrificing one person’s reputation and privacy for the greater public good. What should journalists do? And what should they avoid doing?
On the final day of the workshop, each of us was asked to share one ethical problem from our past without telling the group what we did at the time. The group then had to help that person by running through a series of ethical tests such as family values, peer review and public scrutiny. Only at the end of the session could we reveal the decisions we had made and reflect on what we could have done differently.
Many of us defended the decisions we had made – and we found the training program didn’t answer all our questions. It seems to me that when it comes to making ethical decisions, there can never be a perfect and easy answer. Our co-trainer Lim quoted the wisdom of John Lydgate, a 15-century English monk and poet: “You can please some of the people all of the time. You can please all of the people some of the time. But you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”
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