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Accepting the Blame

By JERRY CEPPOS Outgoing president Associated Press Managing Editors More on Ceppos

The theme of our conference is "leadership in action." But I want to talk to you today about a remarkable lack of leadership for which we all share the blame . . . if only someone would accept the blame.

Let me start 3 1/2 years ago, when I wrote a column for the San Jose Mercury News, where I was the executive editor. I said that a controversial Mercury News series had been flawed, that we hadn't proven our case.

The column received a good bit of coverage, including a front-page article in The New York Times that said, in the lead, that the editor of the Mercury News had published "a highly unusual critique . . . in his own newspaper."

At the time, I remember being troubled that such an action was "highly unusual." But friends, including many people in this room, told me that we had done something good for journalism, that such a column wouldn't be considered "highly unusual" in the future.

Well, I'm here to tell you that my friends were wrong.

Only three weeks ago, The New York Times published a long note "from the editors" about coverage of the Wen Ho Lee case.

Here is how we -- the press -- described that note . . . described it accurately, in my opinion.

From the Associated Press: "Media experts praised The New York Times for an unusual 1,680-word editors' note. . . ."

From Reuters: "In a highly unusual editors' note on Page 2 of the paper. . . ."

The Boston Globe chose the same adjectives: "a highly unusual post-mortem. . . ."

The Washington Post wrote: "In an extraordinary editors' note, The New York Times acknowledged yesterday that its reporting . . . contained 'flaws. . . .' "

The New York Daily News: "The Wen Ho Lee spy case produced its first nuclear explosion yesterday, right in the lap of The New York Times."

So, we're back where we started, despite studies proving that readers trust us more if we admit our mistakes -- a shocking conclusion that probably didn't need studies because you tell your kids the same thing.

The great irony is that we're refusing to explain ourselves at a time when we are furiously trying to delineate ourselves from the purveyors of news-as-a-commodity -- TV, radio, and especially non-journalistic websites.

Frequent, honest corrections would go a long way toward that delineation. Longer explanatory pieces, such as the Times' note, would do even more. And other ideas are out there. For example, you'll hear more this week about a Ford Foundation grant to APME to run national credibility roundtables, at least one in each state.

Who's responsible for our profession's insane inability to own up to its errors? I sweated over this paragraph and tried to be politic, to find someone to blame other than ourselves. There must be a villain because this is not tough stuff.

One routine place to put blame would be on our publishers; we blame them for everything else. But I don't know one publisher who has told the editor: "Listen, I don't want to see us correcting our mistakes."

Our strong-willed staff members would be another good excuse. But, as we are likely to learn in the APME Leadership College on Saturday, people love to be led, even if we're too scared to provide that leadership.

Bob Haiman, a former president of APME, puts it another way in the Freedom

Forum's marvelous new handbook on Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists:

"Staffers should never be unclear about what the boss thinks is appropriate. . . . Top editors should routinely initiate discussions with the staff on the values that are important to the newspaper."

Incidentally, you'll be given copies of this handbook tonight at the Freedom Forum. I think it is so good that I have ordered a copy for every Knight Ridder journalist, all 6,000 of them.

I was talking about all of this on Tuesday with a reporter from the San Antonio Express-News. He asked me about steps that newspapers can take to end credibility problems. I was embarrassed because my answers were so simple. Here are the simple, practical steps that I told him you can take:

One: Let the staff know that you expect mistakes to be corrected, as Bob Haiman suggests.

Two: Decriminalize corrections. Don't complain that your paper is running too many corrections. Complain that it's running too few. In a newspaper of 25 or 50 or 100 pages, we must make hundreds of errors. But I've not seen a single newspaper run even a dozen corrections on any day.

Three-and-a-half years from now, I hope that every one of your newspapers is running a dozen corrections a day--seriously. You make more than that many mistakes.

Three: Use errors as a way of illuminating our profession. If people understood how hard it is to report a simple story, they'd give us more leeway. Use a little imagination. I'll bet that most newspapers that used the Times' Wen Ho Lee stories didn't come back around after the Times ran its note from the editors. What a missed opportunity to explain to readers that many of us rely on outside sources for much of our coverage.

Four: This sounds easy, but seems not to be: Remember that every story needs the other side.

Last week, I read an 11-paragraph story about an anti-Israel rally in San Francisco. The writer enumerated the complaints of the protesters -- with not a word summarizing the general Israeli position. And, yes, I suspect that many stories on this subject have been written the other way around, too.

Five, and most important: Work on mindset. Yours and that of the people you work with. That's really the problem. Last week, a reader called me to say that his paper had made a subtle but significant error in Al Gore's position on abortion.

By the time he finished, I thought that he probably was right, even though I almost tuned out because he is one of those passionate people talking about a hot-button topic who doesn't allow a newspaper much leeway. He told me that an editor I respect had turned down his request for a correction, so I asked the editor why.

First, the editor told me that the paper indeed had failed to make a "distinction," but it wasn't an "error."

Second, he wrote me in an e-mail: "I also told (the reader) that I had instructed our editors to be more careful about this distinction in the future; he, however, insisted -- DEMANDED! (and that is upper case, with an exclamation point) -- a correction. . . . This guy has called (the publisher, the editor), me. He sounds nutty on the subject. He won't write a letter to the editor; he demands a correction?"

What is the big deal about a correction?

Remember, this is not a summer-replacement clerk talking, this is an editor I respect greatly who is, in fact, proud of his record of handing most complaints. But something made him tune out this time, probably the insistence of the reader and his passion about an issue that's tough to win on: abortion.

Regardless, this newspaper lost a chance to be fair, for whatever reason.

(A postscript added after this speech was given: After I received the e-mail, the paper reconsidered and did run a correction. It was published two weeks -- and many phone calls -- after the error appeared.)

It's not alone.

According to a website critical of The New York Times, executive editor Joe Lelyveld told an editors' retreat last month that "persistent accuracy problems" there are like "carpenter ants nibbling at the beams that hold the thing together."

Lelyveld reportedly told his top editors that "the attitude sometimes seems to be that accuracy is a preoccupation of petty minds, and that any highlighting of failure is a relapse to the bad old days."

The website said that he noted that the paper has misspelled Katharine

Graham's name 14 times and Madeleine Albright's first name 49 times -- "even while running three corrections on each."

Likewise, the wise outgoing ombudsman of The Washington Post recalled in her farewell column on Sunday that a Post editor had written in 1969: "I believe that credibility is one of our most serious problems."

She added: "That can be said still, though the 'our' would refer not just to the Post but also to American journalism more generally."

She then enunciated some of the sins of the Post, and used these very words: rudeness, snideness, arrogance, ignorance, inaccessibility, and "equating good newspapering with 'bad' news."

But she did write that the Post's managing editor is launching a campaign to seek out "avoidable errors in routine writing" and to work on "fairness in tone."

You might feel more comfortable, knowing that editors of two of America's most distinguished newspapers worry about fairness and accuracy, the "carpenter ants" of American journalism.

Don't.

Their candor only illustrates that this crisis -- this crisis that can be resolved--permeates American journalism because of my lack of leadership and yours.

Thank you.

-- JERRY CEPPOS, vice president for news for Knight Ridder, delivered these remarks on Oct. 19, 2000 in San Antonio, Texas.

JERRY CEPPOS BIO
Vice President/News
Knight Ridder

Jerry Ceppos last year was named vice president for news of Knight Ridder, which publishes 31 daily newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Detroit Free Press, and Miami Herald. He also is a member of the company’s Executive Committee. Before becoming the chief news executive of the company, Jerry spent 27 years at the Mercury News and the Herald. He was executive editor of the Mercury News for four years before taking his current job.

Jerry is the outgoing president of the Associated Press Managing Editors, a nationwide editors' group. He also served two terms as president of the California Society of Newspaper Editors. He was a Pulitzer Prize juror in 1996 and 1997. In the community, he is a member of the board of trustees of the Northern California Cancer Center.

One of Jerry’s interests is journalism education. He is president of the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, which sets standards for journalism programs at the university level and accredits them. He also serves on the boards of visitors of the College of Journalism of the University of Maryland, from which he was graduated in 1969, and of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1997, the Society of Professional Journalists named Jerry one of three winners of its first national Ethics in Journalism Award. He was recognized for a column acknowledging shortcomings of a controversial Mercury News series.

Also in 1997, the Anti-Defamation League honored him with its Torch of Liberty Award for service to journalism and to the community. In 1996, he received an excellence award from Knight Ridder, which owns the Mercury News, for diversifying the staff and the pages of the newspaper.