I was a young reporter eager to break the story. The tip came into my work email and I was ready.
A man that lived in an apartment complex wrote to me that for months he had seen several sheriff's office deputies sitting in the back parking lot of a church in his neighborhood. The man wrote that as many as ten deputies, sometimes more, would be outside of their patrol cars talking and drinking coffee for two hours plus, daily. What were they doing and why? Certainly his tax dollars could be put to better use by having these deputies out on the street. Sounds like a great story, right? It was, but for all the wrong reasons.
After pitching the story to my News Director, I was out the door with a small camera and an unmarked SUV with tinted windows. I visited the neighborhood three times over the course of a couple weeks. I setup the camera on a tripod in the back of the SUV. Over the course of two weeks I shot hours of video of exactly what our tipster said we'd find. I logged each patrol car I saw, and also the amount of time each deputy spent there.
Once we had the tipster's side of the story it was time to call the sheriff's office to find out what these deputies were up to.
The sheriff's office told me deputies would gather behind the church to get their daily reports signed off on by the shift supervisor. It's a lengthy process at times where the supervisor checks reports for accuracy and for the needed legal documentation. The location where deputies were meeting was picked because it was in the center of the district and the most viable spot for deputies with take home cruisers.
When I took all the information I had gathered to my news director, the story was a wash. Any coverage we gave the story wouldn't have been fair because the deputies weren't doing what we were told by our tipster. I filed the video and reporter notes in my bottom desk door and moved on.
A couple months later, I couldn't help but notice a sweeps story promotion for a competing station in the market. If you aren't familiar with sweeps, it's a ratings period for broadcast media where Nielsen meters homes and determines a newscasts viewership. Sweeps (February/May/July/November) is important because the more viewers a station gets, the more advertising dollars it can ask for.
The tease of the headline was tantalizing.... "Deputies caught slacking on the job. Tonight at 11."
You can imagine my shock and surprise when I looked and saw video of the same deputies, behind the same church that I had staked out.
The story later that night was everything you'd expect from a hard-hitting investigation. Gritty undercover video. A dramatic reporter voice track that itself called the deputies actions into question. The camera stormed the deputies in the parking lot and the reporter shouted out questions in a way that made the deputies guilty of something before they even had the opportunity to answer.
Because the sheriff's office knew we had looked into the story months prior and didn't run with it, I couldn't help myself but call the next day. Needless to say no one was happy. In fact, my contact with the sheriff's office was so displeased she wanted the story covered and was willing to give us inside details into the reasons the deputies gathered in the church parking lot.
As I approached my News Director a second time concerning the story, I got the green light.
One week later, our story hit the air. It detailed the circumstances that put deputies in the church parking lot everyday. Communication equipment wasn't advanced enough for deputies at the time to file their reports wirelessly. That led to a timely process of shift commanders county-wide having to sit and wait for deputies to bring them reports to be signed off on. In most cases, deputies would be off-the-clock behind the church just to get their reports completed so they could go home for the day. The sheriff's office gave us exclusive access and details into a new plan by the county to install laptops and wireless equipment in all of its cruisers to avoid situations like we saw at the church. The cost was rather dramatic which itself generated another story months later.
The same issue, two totally different stories!
This real-life example of media ethics is a great illustration of how stories can be morphed by the media outlet doing the story-telling. In the first example of the competing station the details were turned inside out, selectively picked to make the story more sensationalistic and to make the station appear more "hard-hitting" in the work it was doing for its viewers. Our story, on the other hand, got to the source of the problem. Although our coverage wasn't sensationalistic, it gave viewers an insightful and beneficial look into what the real problem was.
So what can you do as a viewer to better determine ethics in the news you get? For starters, don't buy into the hype. It is easy to identify a sensationalized story so next time one grabs your attention ask the tough questions when you watch, read or listen. Did this media outlet get both sides of the story? Could there be a deeper and different problem than the one the story focused on? Finally, does the story present any solutions from people interviewed? If you can't find these elements in the news that got your attention, chances are you aren't getting the whole story.
Because we are flooded with various media today, we all are exposed and impacted by ethics in media. It is up to us, the audience, to determine which media will get our attention and which gets discarded. The more people act as "watchdogs" of the kind of media they pay attention to, the quicker irresponsible journalists can be held to task.
Jason Lanning is a broadcast journalist from Tampa, FL and operates his own website addressing media ethics and his experience with irresponsible media.
Published articles and Jason's website not sponsored by or affiliated with any media organizations.
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