montanajournalism Dean Abramson, J-School

We no longer control the video…

The recent tragedy at WDBJ in Roanoke, VA has prompted the usual journalistic introspection about violent imagery. Our industry has shown once again that we are a wild bunch, with no unified standards. Some outlets covering the shooting of Alison Parker and Adam Ward chose to show isolated snippets from the station’s own video of the shooting, which transpired live on air. Some held back. Others went so far as to show bits of the video recorded by the alleged shooter, Vester Flanagan. But some stayed away from those particular images. Decisions were all over the map.

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There was a time when these judgments would have felt very weighty, but that time has passed. Personally, I think that is for the best.   I chose to view all the videos and can say they were truly horrifying.   That was my choice, and I am sure many people will choose differently. On this topic, the Internet truly is a democratic medium. I do not view those beheading videos—again, my choice, and I do not judge those who do look.

TV and newspapers no longer get to decide whether the public should be protected from grisly pictures. We can always go elsewhere. The debates in newsrooms about what to show seem quaint, almost dated. It’s true that TV viewers are in a unique position, because they might be surprised by a sudden gory video. That is why TV long faced tougher scrutiny from regulators.

You can argue that Internet videos feed such violence by guaranteeing an audience for the unstable. I cannot agree. Along with relics like the Fairness Doctrine, our editorial nanny state is being whittled away by YouTube and Twitter. You can avert your eyes, but you cannot stop the change. Journalists can now move on to the more serious business of covering violence and its causes, and stop focusing on ethics questions from a bygone era.

Larry Abramson

montanajournalism Dean Abramson, Events, J-School

Don’t trust, verify!

This week my former colleague Ira Glass joined the chorus http://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2015/05/canvassers-study-in-episode-555-has-been-retracted of those backing off of stories on apparently bogus social science research. The original study, in the respected journal Science, purported to show that canvassers could change the minds of survey subjects initially opposed to gay marriage if they spent a mere 20 minutes talking to them. The data behind the study was more than flawed—it was fabricated, and has since led to a rare retraction by the lead author http://tinyurl.com/luqvdg5.  Inquiring minds want to know: should journalists have smelled something fishy?

Let me lead the chorus of critics in saying that I, for one, would never have been so gullible. Journalistic hindsight is better than 20/20, it is full of shadenfreude: I’m so glad I didn’t do it!  But slow down. This is not the Rolling Stone article, where reporters and editors simply failed to ask hard questions. When it comes to science pieces reporters are at extreme risk. Typically they trust the data is correct. Journalists can’t be expected to climb inside the cyclotron and verify a physics experiment, right? We have been schooled to trust the peer review process, which depends on the scientific community to validate the evidence before it is published.

That trust puts us at an important disadvantage when it comes to science. Would we trust a defense official to interpret data about spending, or would we examine the figures ourselves? Statistically, fraud in science is pretty rare, so it’s hard to identify harm here. But when it happens, as it has here, it exposes our helplessness when it comes to complex material.

The sad thing here is that it took an enormous effort from other scientists, not journalists, to ferret out the fraud. Stanford’s David Brockman et al went to great lengths to validate the study, and found they could not. Brockman’s group applied a level of statistical acumen that few daily journalists can match. This fact underscores that science journalism is in a strange category. It exists in a twilight zone where few journalists dare to question or even examine underlying data. So maybe it’s time to question to absolute trust many journalists have in their science sources.

montanajournalism Dean Abramson, J-School, Student

Inside/Outside

As a reporter, I covered higher education for years.  I always felt like I was peering through smoky glass at a strange world.  That world seemed hidebound by rules from another era, encased in proud traditions that made little sense.  Now that I’m inside the ivory tower, the tables are turned, somewhat.

As a reporter, one of my pet peeves was the low success rate at many colleges and universities.  At many schools, only 10 percent of students can be expected to graduate.  I found this fact a shocking waste of talent and money for students, for hard-pressed families, and for the governments that fronted the money for these half-finished degrees.  I pushed administrators hard to explain why they could not improve those numbers.  Many shrugged their shoulders and said, they could only do so much, that student’s lives and lack of preparation simply get in the way of their studies.

Now, I’m a college administrator.   Our university is facing a decline in enrollment, thanks in large part to demographics we cannot control.  At the same time, the state is pressuring us to improve outcomes, just the sort of thing this reporter wanted to see.  But to this college administrator, that laudable goal seems a lot further away.  We know the easiest way to ensure that more students stay in school and graduate is to raise our standards, and recruit students who are better prepared.  Doing that, however, might cut our enrollment, because many students would not have the grades qualify.   So we’d get more money for retention numbers, but then lose it on enrollment.  It turns out, there are only so many ways to squeeze the balloon before it pops.

This is an old story—reporter gets a real job, and learns life ain’t as simple as he thought.  But that doesn’t meant those questions I used to ask were unfair or off base.  Now, it’s my job to help fix the problem, no matter how hard it is.  And I hope some reporter is out there staring at the numbers and putting pressure on people in higher ed—including me—to do a better job.

Dean Larry Abramson