COLLEGE PARK, Md., June 13
/Standard Newswire/ -- The Scooter Libby trial dramatically
illustrated that all is not well in the Bush administration and in
Washington power politics in general. But it also showed how little
most of mainstream media care about transparency, despite frequent
calls from media organizations for greater accountability and
openness from public officials. During the Libby saga, not only were
journalists reluctant to say what they knew and how they knew it,
but their news organizations were also loathe to admit mistakes and
seemingly couldn't bear going public with their internal staff and
reporting guidelines.
A new study out today from the
University of Maryland takes a look at the media and concludes that,
like government and corporations, news outlets lack transparency
about what they do and how they do it. "News outlets call for
transparency by others and are balking at transparency for
themselves," noted researcher Susan D. Moeller, a journalism
professor at the University of Maryland and the director of the
International Center for Media and the Public Agenda which conducted
the study. "The media are in the position of saying to the Enrons
and Arthur Andersens out there, 'Do as I say, not as I do."
The new ICMPA study, "Openness &
Accountability: A Study of Transparency in Global Media Outlets,"
looked at 25 of the world's top news sites to see which ones
publicly correct their errors, are open about who owns them, post
their staff and reporting policies, and welcome reader comments and
criticism. Who were the most transparent? The Guardian, The New York
Times, The Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio.
Who were among the worst? Time
magazine, Al Jazeera (English), CNN and The Economist. What most
news sites manage best, according to the study, is admitting to who
owns them. Still even that public information is rarely prominent,
and news outlets differ on the details they provide-most are chary,
for example, about disclosing other media and nonmedia holdings of
their parent corporations.
Another finding of the study:
most sites have at least one or two venues through which readers can
make comments about the news coverage-by emailing reporters
directly, for example, or leaving remarks on blogs or at the bottom
of stories. But nine of the sites have no provision for visitors to
write letters to the editor-effectively all of the broadcast
outlets, with CNN and PRI's radio program "The World" being
exceptions. And only six of the 25 news outlets in the study have a
readers' representative or ombudsman-five newspapers and National
Public Radio.
Even more striking: fewer than
half of the websites (11 out of 25) publicly correct mistakes in
their stories. Again, it is the broadcast outlets that have a
particularly poor track record. "You'd think," said Moeller, "that
news outlets that have been burned in the past by their inadequate
responses to mistakes found in their reporting - such as CBS News -
would have been eager to create a prominent space on their websites
for corrections. As the Dan Rather case showed, trying to sweep
errors under the proverbial rug only serves to enrage audience
members and inflame the watchdogs in the blogs."
But where the news sites really
did poorly was on posting their guidelines for writing and editing
stories. Almost across the board, the study showed that mainstream
news outlets are unwilling to make public their editorial and
ethical guidelines.
"News outlets are missing an
opportunity to demonstrate to their readers that they value accuracy
and journalistic standards," said Moeller. "Now it's true that media
transparency doesn't ensure that individual reporters will always be
honest brokers of information - as Jayson Blair and Judith Miller
taught the New York Times. But a news outlet's commitment to being
transparent helps its visitors understand the judgments made by the
news operation and gives those visitors a venue for complaints and
criticism when something goes awry. Ultimately - if not immediately
- transparency leads to accountability. And accountability leads to
credibility."
The following is the list of 25
online news outlets evaluated by this study: ABC, Al Jazeera
(English), The BBC World Service, CBS, The Christian Science
Monitor, CNN, The Daily Telegraph, The Economist, The Financial
Times, Fox News, The Guardian, The International Herald Tribune, ITN,
The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, NBC/MSNBC, The New York
Times, Newsweek, NPR ("Morning Edition"/ "All Things Considered"),
PRI/BBC/WGBH: "The World," Sky News, Time, USA Today, The Wall
Street Journal, The Washington Post.
This study on media transparency
is the most recent report released by the International Center for
Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA), a center of the Philip Merrill
College of Journalism and the School of Public Policy at the
University of Maryland, College Park.
