When Mistakes Happen…
by Gary Hanson,
Kent State University
Everyone makes mistakes, even in television newsrooms, and sometimes
mistakes get on the air. But how often? And with what consequences?
Those
were some of the questions in a recent national survey of 75 news managers
that Stanley Wearden and I conducted at Kent State University with support
from NewsLab.The results are sobering, and raise questions about efforts
to achieve accuracy in TV news.
The survey revealed that errors are common in both large and small
markets, occurring at least once or twice a week. In just over a quarter
of the newsrooms surveyed, managers said errors get on the air every
day.
The most common mistakes are misspellings and mispronunciations; most
news managers said they don’t consider those errors particularly serious.
The most significant error, they said, was getting a fundamental fact
wrong, which was the least common mistake they reported.
Far more frequent were subjective errors—inflating a story’s importance,
for example, or producing a misleading promo. Yet even though errors
in promos have led to high-profile lawsuits that have cost stations
millions of dollars, most news managers ranked those kinds of errors
as less serious than factual errors like getting a name or number wrong.
Whatever the perceived gravity of the error, journalists who make mistakes
rarely face serious consequences. Only one news manager out of the 75
surveyed said an employee would be fired for incorrectly reporting a
person’s death.
On the flip side, one respondent actually said that nothing at all
would happen to an employee who incorrectly accused someone of a crime.
But most news managers said anyone making either of those mistakes
would deserve least a written reprimand, and about one in six said a
mistake like that could lead to suspension.
Almost
two-thirds of the news managers surveyed said that reporters are the
first line of defense against mistakes, followed by newscast producers
and executive producers.
Script review is the major mechanism newsrooms have in place for catching
mistakes, and as an earlier NewsLab study revealed, the script approval
process in many newsrooms is haphazard at best. Even if script reviews
are a regular occurrence, the person doing the review may not be in
a position to catch mistakes other than spelling or grammatical errors
because he or she doesn’t know the story well enough to spot errors
of omission or distortion.
The survey results should serve as a warning to television newsrooms.
If managers really believe that accuracy matters, they’d do well to
consider what kind of message they send the staff when most mistakes
merit only an oral reminder or reprimand.
And if most managers count on reporters to catch their own mistakes,
it might be wise to offer the less experienced among them some refresher
training to make sure they’re equipped to do the job.
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