A Penguin in the Orchard

Journalism 101

This is the corollary to yesterday’s post about the West Virginia mine tragedy.

Media forced to explain inaccurate reports on tragedy - Yahoo! News

Newspapers, wire services and cable news networks all failed in one degree or another to do their jobs properly when they reported that 12 men had survived the coal mine disaster in West Virginia, media critics and chastened editors say.

Fail, they did. In fact, had these reporters been journalism students, they’d have spectacularly failed a pop quiz on sourcing stories.

It’s fundamental journalism that reporters rely on two types of sources: primary and secondary. A primary source is one with firsthand knowledge of a story. Everyone else with knowledge relevant to the story is a secondary source. Stories are developed first around information received from the primary sources, which, in a perfect world, is further corroborated by other primary or secondary sources.

In the case of the West Virginia mine disaster reporting, the only primary source would have been a high-ranking official with the mining company. Without confirmation from that primary source, news organizations simply should not have reported as fact that 12 miners were alive. The report that these miners were alive should have only been reported as unconfirmed. Given the scene on CNN, for example, it would have been impossible to ignore the report. But it was reported as unconfirmed for only the briefest period of time.

This, I think, says a lot about the distance the media has put between itself and fundamental journalism:

Mike Silverman, the AP’s managing editor, said in a statement Wednesday it “was reporting accurately the information that we were provided by credible sources - family members and the governor. Clearly, as time passed and there was no firsthand evidence the miners were alive, the best information would have come from mine company officials, but they chose not to talk.”

This badly blurs the critical distinction between primary sources and credible sources. In journalism, the only credible source upon which to build a story is a primary source. That doesn’t include family members or the governor, regardless of how credible they might seem. Unless those family members or the governer were firsthand witnesses to the radio transmission by the rescue team that 12 miners were alive, they can only be secondary sources regardless of their apparent credibility. Again, the only sources qualified to support the story that the miners were alive would have been company officials inside the control center at the time the rescuers reported on their findings. Everything else is secondhand and secondary.

It’s journalism 101, folks. Report as confirmed only the information you can confirm with primary sources. Use secondary sources only to support the primaries. Never report as fact a story based on statements by secondary sources. If you have to report something, as was the case with the cable networks on Tuesday night, report as unconfirmed the accounts of secondary sources. And do even that with great caution.