Otterblog

We did a story on qigong today that featured a gentleman named David McMahon.

We called him a naturopathic doctor, which brought forth this series of questions:

Is it right for the paper to call people ‘doctor’ if they haven’t gone to med school? There are accredited naturopathic medical schools in the USA that require 4 years of medical education and 3 years of standard premedical education. But in states like North Carolina, lax regulation apparently allows people with little to no education in the field of naturopathy to claim they are doctors.

Let me try to answer these in a way that makes sense in the general and particular instance.

First off, lots of people are called doctor these days. Not all of them are medical doctors or MDs. AP style is as follows: Use Dr. in first reference as a formal title before the name of an individual who holds a doctor of dental surgery, doctor of medicine, doctor of osteopathy, or doctor of podiatric medicine degree: Dr. Jonas Salk.

It also goes on to say: If appropriate in the context, Dr. also may be used on first reference before the names of individuals who hold other types of doctoral degrees. However, because the public frequently identifies Dr. only with physicians, care should be taken to assure that the individual’s specialty is stated in first or second reference. The only exception would be a story in which the context left no doubt that the person was a dentist, psychologist, chemist, historian, etc.

AP style isn’t the last word. The Journal, like many newspapers, adjusts when we think AP style needs adjusting. Here’s our further elaboration on doctoring.

We should use the title with the greatest restraint and reluctance. Here are the conditions under which we may use the title: 1. The reporter knows what narrow ... subject the doctoral degree is in. 2. The story depicts the person actually doing something or speaking in that narrow subject. 3. The degree is significant to the story by enhancing the person’s standing as a credible subject or source in his narrow academic subject.

You’ll note in the story above that we didn’t use Dr. as a title, just as part of a descriptive clause. We thought that was a reasonable compromise. There is some legitimate question about the training and licensing needed to practice naturopathic medicine. In this instance, based on D/Mr. McMahon’s resume and professional affiliations, we thought it was appropriate to refer to him as a doctor.

We had a good debate this afternoon about a story running on the wires about a conference in Iran that is a collection of Holocaust deniers. Yes, there are people out there in the world who continue to insist that this tragedy never took place. This story, published electronically, and soon to be published the old-fashioned way in many newspapers, raises good questions about the limits of objectivity and the idea of balancing different beliefs.

The debate focused about whether a story on a bunch of holocaust deniers—including David Duke—ought to run anywhere. Point being, the standard narrative of journalism frequently has person A saying one thing, and person B saying another. Often, the sense of weight or proportionality gets lost, and you’re left with an on the one hand, on the other approach that fails to recognize the intellectual, scientific or historical imbalance of the arguments.

My guess is that if this conference was in Singapore or Barcelona, we would kill it. But it’s in Iran, which has been singled out—along with Syria—by the Iraq Study Group as our new partners of sorts in finding a solution for war in Iraq. It was organized by the president of Iran, and it indicates who we will be dealing with in the months ahead.

Making a list: The AP this time of year sends out its lists of top news stories for the state and the nation and the world. If you’ve got ideas for stories that ought to be on our local top 10 list, let me know. Could be Wake’s ACC win, shakeup on the county commissioners, the school bonds, etc.

We’ve discussed in the past the power of words to help define a situation. That’s what’s going on today with the media, in terms of the situation in Iraq. Several outlets, most notably NBC and the Los Angeles Times, now refer to the Iraq conflict as a “civil war.”

Here’s a discussion from Editor & Publisher.  The Bush administration, not surprisingly, objects to this terminology. One general couldn’t say what it was if it wasn’t civil war, but said there were “unacceptable levels of violence.”

The Associated Press, which the Journal often but not always defers to in matters of style, has yet to use “civil war” without a qualifier. Usually it writes of the situation as possibly deteriorating into “all-out civil war.” It tends to be more cautious than many individual papers and members who belong to the AP.

The larger question, of course, is whether it makes a difference what the situation is called. I think it does. One person’s civil war is another’s sectarian strife.

I received several complaints about some police briefs that we had in Wednesday’s paper. There were four briefs about various robberies and shootings. The second one carried this headline: Police look for tall, thin white man in robbery. The other briefs made no mention of the suspect’s race, which led callers to assert that we were going out of our way to avoid using race when black suspects were involved.

I’ll agree that the juxtaposition is problematic, and the headline is jarring, and if we had to do it again, we’d rewrite, but there’s a larger question about when we use race as a descriptor in police stories.

My good friend, mentor and predecessor as managing editor, Jim Laughrun, assembled a crime coverage manual that guides many of our decisions in this area. Like all guides, it’s not meant to be carved in stone. The first line in our section about racial IDs says, “Do not mention a person’s race or ethnic background unless it is relevant to the story.”

The section goes on to say it’s OK to use race if a suspect is at large and police have a good description. In other words, we wouldn’t just write that police are looking for a black man or a white man or a Hispanic man in his 20s. There’s thousands of people in our community who fit that description. It doesn’t really help anything. In the brief in Wednesday’s paper, here’s the description of the suspect we used: “white, in his 30s, 6 feet tall and weighing 150 pounds, with brown hair, a black baseball cap worn backward, a camouflage jacket and blue jeans.” That’s useful.

I checked our electronic archives, and here are some recent descriptions we used:

  —The robber was described as a black man between 5 feet 8 inches and 6 feet tall, 140 pounds, with a large afro that police said was probably a wig.
  He wore a purple windbreaker, a dark bandanna covering his face and a dark backpack with white writing on it.

— The robber was described as white, about 6 feet tall, 215 pounds, wearing a camouflage mask, blue sweatshirt and light-blue jeans.

  —The robber was described as a black man of medium complexion in his late 20s, about 6 feet 2 and more than 200 pounds. He was wearing a white T-shirt, a white baseball cap, long, faded blue-jean shorts and white shoes. Hints said that the man had a thin beard.

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Careful readers of the Journal would probably detect that our newsroom’s relationship with U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx is, to put it politely, strained. Some people might call it a feud, but I wouldn’t. A feud implies both sides are mad at each other and actively engaging in the other’s discomfort. I can’t speak for Rep. Foxx, but from the Journal newsroom’s perspective, there isn’t a feud. We’re just trying to cover the news.

The situation began in early August, when we interviewed Rep. Foxx about her trip to Iraq. Our story said, but didn’t quote her as saying, that she thought the war in Iraq was going well. She disputed our summary of her remarks. We reviewed the interview and said it was accurate. We even let her criticize the reporting in a subsequent article. We’ve had these disagreements with politicians before. But this one went from 0-60 in a heartbeat.

Letter writers swarmed over her comments, and they blanketed our editorial page editor with letters criticizing Rep. Foxx for her view of the war. The ratio of pro-con is very lopsided. As is the case at most larger newspapers, the news pages and the editorial pages are kept separate. They don’t tell us what stories to write, and we don’t tell them what opinions to have. Other than courtesy e-mails, we communicate very little with them and don’t coordinate coverage. Which is how it should be.

My sense is that this distinction, which we prize so heavily, is lost on lots of people. It’s in the Journal, and that’s all that matters.

We’ve tried to work things out with Rep. Foxx but have been unsuccessful. Lots of conversations with her staff but nothing has changed. She won’t talk to our reporters, on occasion going to elaborate lengths to avoid those conversations. Much of the Rube Goldbergesque arrangements of today’s debate appears to have been crafted to keep the Journal from covering it. And so it goes.

This places the newsroom in an uncomfortable position. First, we don’t like to be the news. Second, how we cover politicians is affected by the access we have to them. 

So where do we go from here? Not quite sure. There’s an election in less than a week, and my guess is that Rep. Foxx will be re-elected with a vote in the high 50s. Some people might say that’s a referendum on Foxx vs. the Journal. We lost. She won. We owe her an apology. I disagree. If you go back to what I wrote earlier, that the Journal’s newsroom has no feud with Foxx, then that supposition looks a little hollow. And even if you carry it over to the editorial page, it looks silly. Some of the candidates they will endorse will win, others will lose.

If Rep. Foxx never talks to us again, we just keep doing what we’re doing. We don’t stop covering issues just because somebody is mad at us.
We’re like Charlie Brown and the football. We’ll keep trying to talk with her. Our life goes on.

The larger issue is how do people find out what their elected officials are doing in Washington? The media is a filter and a strainer. We organize, we summarize, we analyze. Politicians—Republicans and Democrats alike—often prefer that the filter be removed, that their constituents get it straight from them, the words and deeds as they would like them to be presented. At many newspapers, that’s the case. They don’t have a reporter in Washington who keeps track of their local congressmen and congresswomen. They’re at the mercy of press releases.

That situation is likely to get worse. Washington coverage by small metro papers is disappearing. The Journal is one of the smallest papers in the country to have a full-time Washington correspondent. The point being, if we don’t cover Rep. Foxx, nobody else will, at least not with any depth or consistency. You might think, hooray! But you’d be wrong.

Voting the brand: One addendum to our story today on the Foxx-Sharpe debate is the dueling water bottles on the set. I’ve attached the jpeg of the photo above. Sharpe is a Dasani guy (it’s made by Coke); Foxx is with Nestle. Bigger bottle too. The question, of course, is this: Which candidate(s) brought their own water?

It is always a little wierd to be in the news. I prefer a more anonymous existence. But you can’t always control everything.

I have leading role in a story on the Poynter Institute’s Romenesko Web site about a young journalist’s job search this summer. Here’s the link.

The background: a recent college graduate called me up and said he was going to be in town and could he come by for an interview. Nice guy. We talked. He left. He wrote me a few months later with a draft of a story he was working on for Poynter about hunting for a job. A little strange, especially the notion of a private discussion suddenly being the subject of a story. And it’s interesting to see how other people see you. The implication from the piece is that I am a hardass. Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m pretty direct and I believe job interviews aren’t just for chit-chatting.

We had a question a week or so back about the appropriateness of making photos of the Amish at the funerals of the girls who were shot to death at the school.

Here’s some more information, from a column by the ombudsman of the Washington Post. It’s a good summary and includes some comments from the photographers who participated.

We faced a difficult decision this weekend in our story about the family that won $400,000 from the Forsyth County school system in a civil case. The quick rundown: a former teacher at East Forsyth was convicted of having sex with a student. The family sued the system, arguing that officials knew the teacher had a problem but continued to employ him.

Typically speaking, open court is open court and court records are open court records. Particularly so when public agencies are involved. If the school system is going to pay $400,000, then the recipient of that money ought to be acknowledged.

But not always. The Journal’s coverage of rape victims and sex crimes has evolved over the years. Now, we don’t name the victims of sex crimes, unless they agree to be named.

Complicating things were are the fact that the girl is now 20 and that there’s evidence that the relationship was “consensual.”

We felt that the governing factor was the age of the girl at the time the crime was committed, and that state laws have been written to remove consent as a factor in sex cases involving students and teachers. There may be extenuating circumstances, but it is better to err on the safe side in this instance.

AND THE WINNERS ARE:  Otterblog Jr. and I judged the first annual pumpkin headline writing contest. By unanimous vote, the winner was Dwight Defee with “The Cinderella Regatta.” Honorable mentions to Holy Floatin’ Curcubitas! and Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Paddler. Dwight wins the Journal coffee mug, which I will leave at the front counter for him to pick up. Thanks to all contestants.

I took a call today from a thoughtful person who wanted to know why we published the address of Robert Watson in the newspaper (He’s the teacher charged with more than a dozen counts of sex offenses involving students). The caller’s belief was that publishing the address was unfair and hurtful and embarrassing to his family, that it draws unwanted attention to the neighborhood and that it could lead to a vigilante situation, if somebody wanted to take the law into their own hands.

Newspapers have been publishing the addresses of those charged with crime for as long as I’ve been in the business. It’s so accepted that it’s reflexive. We do it because we always do it. And because we can do it, because that information is part of the arrest warrant. But does that make it right?

I think it’s proper for us to publish addresses of local people charged with crimes. First, an address clears up ambiguity about which person was charged. The phone book lists a half-dozen Robert Watsons in Forsyth County.

Second, crime is a serious matter. And sex crimes are among the most serious. People ought to know what their neighbors are up to. That applies in middle/upper class neighborhoods as well as poor neighborhoods. A two-tier system that used an income test or a ZIP code as a decision on whether to publish an address would be unworkable and unfair.

Third, embarassment and notoriety are unfortunate side effects of publication. But trying to gauge it and set policies around it would be impossible. What embarrasses me might not embarrass you and vice versa. This is not to just throw up our hands and say “We’re done with it all.” Just a sense that as a first step we ought to do what we think is right rather than try to guess people’s reaction to what we think is right.

If you’ve been reading the paper, then you know there is a major investigation underway involving a WSFC teacher. The story broke last week when we got hold of a search warrant that asked to search the teacher’s home computer. From there it’s snowballed into much wider and more serious charges.

You’ll also note that a judge sealed an arrest warrant, which is highly unusual. We negotiated to get that order amended, because we believe that there is information on that warrant that doesn’t name the children that is still valuable for the public to know. This would include how many children are involved. One child is one too many, of course. But is it three or five or 10? That’s what we want to know, and what we believe the public ought to know.

Many people think public records and public-records laws apply just to the media. But they don’t. In fact, if you read the law, which is Chapter 132, you’ll note that the word “newspaper” is never mentioned. The operative word is public. They’re your records.

9X9: I am a serious Sudoku freak. It’s a great brainteaser/unscrambler. We’ve got a

of it on JournalNow. Here’s the link. Try it. You’ll be hooked