Berkman story not all Lantern’s fault
Journalism means “of the day.” It’s French, like soup or salad de jour. But in America, it has a deeper connotation; after all, it’s the only business mentioned in the Constitution. What Journalism should be is a search for truths (there’s never one) and a commitment to the customer to provide information in an accurate and fair fashion.None of these elements were seen in the “Berkman retires” story. (I know I’m a little behind, but out here in the “boondocks,” the Lantern comes to us a week after it’s published. Any other delay can be attributed to my own lethargy. And for those of you with two-minute attention spans, the Lantern ran a story about student trustee Mark Berkman filing his resignation on Jan. 27. The next day the paper ran a retraction and an editorial explaining the retraction.)First and foremost, Mark Berkman has no one to blame but himself for the reports of his retirement and their extreme exaggeration. While he has every right to give a “no comment” to the press as a private citizen, he is a public school official and he’s accountable to the commonwealth, so he owes them an explanation. What’s mystifying about his terse comment is that on Jan. 28’s retraction story, he didn’t explain his reticence to speak. What makes his aversion to talk all the more confusing is that reporters didn’t ask “Why?” Nowhere in the editorial does the writer (Mr. Aho, I suspect, who already reported the story, which is a conflict of interest I’ll discuss later) challenge the East Coaster about the penultimate stupidity of not answering these rumors. And then there’s that paragraph in the editorial that says a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch called you (editors) to verify the story. Common sense should’ve said someone was setting you up for the okeydoke. There would have to be something seriously wrong in Columbus for the Dispatch to call the Lantern to verify anything. No disrespect intended, but I’ve worked at the college lab paper and the Dispatch, and I know there’s no way they’d rely on “college kids” to gather facts for their story. Finally, there’s the Lantern, who deserves a pat on the back for trying to deliver a newsworthy story: a student rep living hundreds of miles away and his subsequent inability to perform his duties.However, the true measure of adulthood and professionalism is how we cope with failure, an area where the Lantern editors are lacking in the next day’s edition. Here’s an excerpt from that Jan. 28 editorial:”For our part, we believe that newspapers are by their very nature inflammatory. Just as the journalist’s first commitment should, and must be, to the facts of the story, there’s a higher function served by the very existence of the newspaper itself. And we believe that function is – or should be – to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”What does that mean? The first responsibility of any newspaper or media outlet is to make money. There is nothing inherently wrong in that admission, it’s just one of those facts you editors seem to admire. Newspapers should be inflammatory, but they should also tell truths. A reporter’s allegiance is never to the facts. Facts don’t clip coupons that advertisers paid to put in the paper. The readership is what makes or breaks a journalistic enterprise. Everything we do should be for them, even if they don’t want to hear it. The common good is our bread and accurate information is our butter.But here’s the most painful part: not one member of the Journalism faculty has written a column or letter pillorying the perpetrators of this chicanery. This was obviously an elaborate scheme on the part of some jackass who wanted to disseminate lies, and it worked. However, it’s more than a joke; it also chips away at the fragile foundation of trust between the journalist and the public. It would’ve helped if a veteran pointed that small fact out and let the readers know you are just learning, that you will get better with practice (and a couple of mistakes.) Their silence speaks volumes about the school and its teachers.No wonder you guys didn’t know enough to just say mea culpa.
Randall OliverStaff writerTroy Daily News
