Journalistic Ethical Dispute

[mjefte2000]

I submitted an investigation story and a multimedia slide show to a Santa Barbara California on line publication www.noozhawk.com

Within hours of the story's publication, it was taken down, specifically because of a single blogger.
The founder and publisher himself (William M. Macfadyen) tried to make nice with the blogger - through Twitter - and took the story down, before I even had time to address the situation.

It turns out the blogger was taking things out of context (obvious when you put the tweet side by side with the actual story) drawing their own conclusions about what we said without even really reading the full story.

This was clearly a case of trying to discredit the publication, not because of wrong facts, but because the message was unflattering.

The story was something of a travelogue (and there was a note explaining this). I myself got kidnapped and fortunately released, but I was able to make quick contacts with Haitians in the city and people from a Haitian organization were willing to protect me as I talked to people in the camps and took photos. I contracted cholera after the rains. I spoke to people who were unjustly incarcerated, members of the European Commission, and workers from different NGOs.

The problem is, another colleague and I were basically left to hang, two trained journalists, by an editor and publisher who seem to have collapsed under a Twitter pressure. Though the story wasn't up for very long, now we find ourselves needing to defend ourselves, because there was no one to back us up in the first place. Blogger wins, with his own mistakes and biases, journalists lose.

What can be done about this?

[mjefte2000]

This is where we are coming from:

I understand that unlike omission, truth and accuracy is the foundation of good journalism.

I have made (in good faith), every effort to assure that the news content is accurate, free from bias and in context, and that all sides are presented fairly showing respect for the facts. I don’t pretend to be unquestionable or refrained from editorial expression.

However, condemning my investigative piece without finding substantial inaccuracies besides the misspelling of a foreign word (which editors should have looked up) doesn’t observe the common standards of decency and does not pretend to stand accountable to the public for the fairness and accuracy of their news reports.

The ethical action from the publisher should have been to give me the earliest opportunity to respectfully respond to the critics of the tweeter. However, the publisher (William M. Macfadyen) wrote, “The attack is basically going paragraph by paragraph in an Internet commentary. Noozhawk doesn't need this kind of attention.”

This lack of principles in journalism is not intended to preserve, protect and/or strengthen the bond of trust and respect between American journalists and the American people, a bond that is essential to sustain the grant of freedom.

Journalism ethics provide a process by which individual mistakes and excesses are corrected without jeopardizing the ultimate objective of a free media—to provide a healthy check on centers of power in order to maintain a free and enlightened society. Not to get a certain “kind of attention.”

The worst thing we can do as journalists is to back away from stories like this from fear of negative publicity. In this case, the freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns the press and this owner decides what the news values will be at his own discretions and agenda. In many cases, this is because of the insufficient capital or marginal journalistic reputation that excludes them. This is one of the many reasons why Americans don’t trust their media anymore.

[jacksonbrown]

The amount of information posted with this platform is more than what I expect from this platform.Keep on posting good posts like this