05-27-2009, 04:47 PM
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#1 (permalink)
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... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.
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Is Broadcast Journalism Mostly Plagiarism?
Quote:
A newspaper reporter would be fired or suspended for something TV and radio reporters do quite often.
Print journalists consider it plagiarism. Broadcasters call it a "rewrite."
Here's how it works in nearly every news market in the country. Print reporters do research and interviews for a story that ends up being about 800 words or so. Broadcasters rewrite and condense the paper's story to around 50 words - sometimes adding their own audio or video - then present it as their own.
In the past few years, Seattle radio and TV stations have gotten better about telling you if a story they're airing is from a local newspaper. Better, but original print and online stories are still broadcast without attribution.
A recent example is a story Levi Pulkkinen did for the Seattlepi.com: Assaults, disturbances up aboard Metro buses. Pulkkinen crunched data he received from Metro following a public records request. That took some time and effort. All of the local TV stations used his story in the morning, and three of them credited the online P-I. By the evening broadcasts, local stations added video of people boarding Metro buses and only one station attributed the information to the P-I.
Maybe this is no big deal. Maybe viewers and readers don't care where stories come from. Ken Robertson does.
Robertson is executive editor of the Tri-City Herald. He says he's tracked dozens of stories broadcasters "ripped off" from his newspaper.
Ken Robertson"Broadcasters are used to this 'we talk and it's gone' mentality, and they get into a habit of taking short cuts," Robertson says.
If the information is common knowledge that a reporter can get from dozens of sources, that's one thing. If broadcasters get information from a newspaper, he says it needs to be attributed. That sounds like a reasonable request.
It's a request he's been making for several decades.
Robertson started at the Tri-City Herald in 1976. He wrote the newsroom's first policy and ethics manual about 20 years ago after one of their staffers "lifted" information from a Seattle newspaper story, and senior reporter took information from an LA Times column.
He's also written a couple of editorials on the issue. One about a trial every media outlet in central Washington reported, he says, by "grabbing" the Herald's exclusive coverage. And when his repeated calls and conversations with broadcasters in his area seemed to "fall on deaf ears" he wrote another editorial a month ago - A capital crime in newspapers, a capital idea in broadcast.
Robertson says one of the worst offenders in the Tri-Cities is KONA radio.
Dennis ShannonKONA's News Director Dennis Shannon says several months ago, someone on his staff pulled a story from the Herald's web site and read the information without attribution. He admits that shouldn't have happened.
Shannon wanted to explain the mistake to The Herald's editors, but he says they haven't responded to his phone calls.
As a policy, Shannon says they do credit The Herald and two other area newspapers whenever KONA uses their stories.
Shannon also says in the past KONA has used information from The Herald, though not direct quotes. If rewriting information constitutes plagiarism, "then we have a problem," he says.
Do we have a problem? As a news consumer, do you care where stations or papers get their stories?
Either way, Robertson says the solution is simple. "Just credit the newspaper and we'd have no complaint," he says.
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Broadcast plagiarism
I'd never really thought about this before, but it makes a lot of sense. Shouldn't the TV stations be getting permission from the actual journalists in order to use their work? Shouldn't this be the solution to saving print media? |
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