My columns usually seek to provide a historical perspective to Missouri public policy. But I would be remiss if I did not react to the attacks by Donald Trump's campaign against my colleagues.
It has become serious enough that the international Committee to Protect Journalists took the unprecedented step in early October to declare Trump "an unprecedented threat to the rights of journalists."
Like CPJ, I'm not taking a position on the campaign. Rather, I'm disputing the charges that professional journalists regularly make up stories, tell lies or invent sources.
Journalism history demonstrates that our profession has acted aggressively when we encounter violations of our standards. For example, in 2001 Jason Blair was forced out after his newspaper discovered he had engaged in plagiarism and fabrication.
Beyond that, two of the newsroom's top executives resigned after the newspaper's investigation found management failures that allowed Blair's deceptions to continue. That newspaper is the very same newspaper that Trump has threatened with a lawsuit for its campaign coverage - The New York Times.
Two years later, a longtime USA Today reporter, Jack Kelley, was forced out after the paper discovered he had invented sources. Like The New York Times, the incident also led to the departure of two top editors.
Just days after she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a Washington Post story in 1980, the prize was returned and the reporter - Janet Cook - resigned after a newspaper investigation led her to admit she had fabricated the story.
On the broadcast side, Dan Rather retired as top CBS anchor in 2004 when he faced criticisms after an outside probe established by the network concluded an investigative report he had narrated and defended contained inaccurate information. More recently, Brian Williams was removed as NBC’s top anchor after it was found he publicly had lied.
These stories demonstrate the seriousness we take to enforce honesty within our profession and to investigate allegations of misdeeds. Like all human beings, journalists occasionally make mistakes.
I have.
My first occurred early in my career when I misidentified a person in a drug-arrest story because I let deadline pressures cause me to miss a middle initial in police records.
More than once, I've failed to recognize important sides to a story.
The one I most vividly remember started as a humorous story about a kid jet skiing in a flooded farm field during Missouri's great flood of 1993. The next day, a public safety official chastised me for not pointing out the dangers of jet skiing in a field with barbed wire fences hidden underwater. While I quickly produced a cautionary story that next day, almost every time I drive by that field outside of Jefferson City, I think about the tragedy I could have caused from my initial story.
I regularly talk about these mistakes with my students. Like most journalists I've known, we're eager to admit our errors to help future generations of journalists. There's an equal passion to identify the dishonesty of others in our craft.
For example, The Washington Post became suspicious about their Pulitzer Prize winner when staffers at her previous newspaper, The Toledo Blade, raised questions about her Pulitzer Prize biography. USA Today reporters had voiced concerns about their disgraced colleague.
It's tough to question a rising star in the newsroom. But it's inspiring the number of times that reporters have stood up to management when they suspect a bad apple. It's this drive among journalists to own up to our own mistakes and expose dishonesty of colleagues that demonstrates the fallacy of conspiracy charges about dishonesty in journalism.
In Trump's defense, the internet is filled with lies, exaggerations and distortions. But the authors of these rants are not professional journalists working for organizations that monitor and enforce honesty.
That's why traditional media remains essential to a democracy. It provides the one place where you can learn about political candidates with a confidence of getting the truth.
Phill Brooks is director of the Missouri School of Journalism’s State Government Reporting Program. He has been a statehouse reporter since 1970, making him the dean of the Missouri statehouse press corps, and he manages the multimedia website on state government news, MDN.org. Brooks can be reached at column@mdn.org.
