How to prevent malfunctions in Journalism

Veteran journalist, William Woo speaks with News Watch about the ëscienceí of detecting and avoiding disasters in journalism.

by Lena-Nsomeka Gomes

William F. Woo is a visiting professor of journalism at Stanford University since 1996. A reporter for 40 years, he was formerly editor-in-chief at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and is currently a professor of ethics at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Your analogy drawing the parallel between some of the failures of journalism with normal accident theory was quite clever (ìJournalismís ëNormal Accidents,î Nieman Reports, Fall 2003. [PDF]
Looking at the journalistic system as a mechanism with a set of values and working units makes a lot of sense. What I found most intriguing about your analysis was how you identified diversity as one of the organized pieces in this web. Most would like to imagine diversity as principally a conceptóa coincidental abstract. Can you elaborate further on the notion that diversity is an operating system in an interactive and complex newsroom?
Most editors think of operating systems ñ as I used to ñ as hardware and software: the front end system on which stories are created; the pagination system that does what the composing room once did; the Scitex system that handles digital photo imaging. These systems and others operate on quantified data and they are set up to do certain tasks that are necessary for the paper to come out as good journalism. Most editors think of diversity ñ as I used to ñ as a value: something that emerges from a just and decent objective to help our news organizations reflect our communities; something that offers long denied opportunities to minorities and women, particularly, as well as other segments of our countryís people who are under-represented in newsrooms; something that helps us connect with our readers in a way that the old monolithic news organization did not. Diversity remains a very important value; but, as I tried to point out in that Nieman Reports article, it has also become an operating system. What does that mean? It means, in one sense, that diversity becomes a quantifiable aspect of the news organization -- in dollars, in people, in the journalism. Diversity considerations factor into executive compensation. Diversity considerations factor into staffing decisions, such as the hiring of regular stuff and in special diversity-driven employment programs (internships). Diversity considerations, in some news organizations, have a role in how stories are sourced and hence reported. They help determine layout and photo play. I am not objecting to any of these. But to the extent that diversity has become an operating system and no longer simply an ideal towards which news organizations strive (or should strive), it further complicates the already intricate and insufficiently studied interplay of forces arrayed for the production of news. Normal accident theory holds that closely linked operating systems, the implications of which may not be fully understood by the people running them and responsible for them, are one of the reasons that such accidents occur. They are not the only reason, but they are surely one of them. In many of the cases you reviewed in your article you found lingering signs of troubleóespecially in the case of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. You correlated these events with the concepts of ëseeing but not seeingí and the process of normalizing deviance. Can you explain briefly what those concepts mean?
The late British sociologist Barry A. Turner, who studied many accidents in the United Kingdom, said ìA way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.î What he meant was evidence that something is going wrong is often visible but it is regarded as simply part of the normal landscape or, in the case of reports, as material irrelevant to the work at hand. The observer fails to connect them with impending trouble. Jayson Blairís phony expense accounts lay around for a long time, but no one took the trouble of examining them. People saw them but they did not ìsee.î (The Chinese have a saying thatís useful to note here: ìSeeing without saying.î That is, even when a portent of danger is actually observed and understood for what it is, social or organizational mores may prevent someone from sounding the alarm.) The phrase normalization of deviance, one of my favorites in normal accident theory, comes from Diane Vaughan, a sociologist at Boston College who wrote about the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986. When professional standards are progressively relaxed, what had been deviant becomes the norm. We become persuaded that what can go wrong actually is likely to go right. So standards decline. Vaughan found in seven of the nine shuttle launches prior to Challenger, there had been problems with the O-rings. In each of these cases nothing happened. Hence, it became assumed that though there were troubles with O-rings, they were not serious enough to scrub a mission. Professional safety standards were lowered and the lower standards (deviant by old measures) became the norm. On the Challenger launch, the O-rings failed and the crew and spacecraft were lost. In journalism, professional standards also have been progressively lowered ñ deviance has become normalized. How? Hereís one example: Internet postings can go up on news Web sites without the kind of rigorous checking that professional standards require. Most of the time, nothing happens. Now and then, it does and thereís embarrassment all around. The standards for verification, for using only named sources, for making every copy editor responsible for reading every story in the edition have declined. What in another day would be called deviance is becoming standardized or normalized. Do you think newsrooms are really capable of developing safety measures that can prevent professional and ethical disasters?
No. The competing theory to normal accident theory is called high reliability theory. It holds that through redundancy of safety mechanisms or procedures, constant training and a high degree of group discipline, organizations can drive the accident rate down to zero or close to it. The systems that are in place to prevent an accidental start of nuclear war are often cited as one example. Aircraft carrier launch and retrieval operations are cited as another. The trouble is, the kind of organizational culture and discipline that make a nuclear missile silo crew or an aircraft carrier deck crew highly efficient is precisely those that are absent in newsrooms. Journalists do not work with multiple redundancies in their basic equipment; they do not train and train and train just for the possibility of one eventual catastrophe; they do not have the rigid organizational discipline that is demanded for high reliability performance (and they probably wouldnít be good journalists if they did). What journalists can do is reduce the possibility of serious accident. But that takes, at the outset, a realization that their profession is highly vulnerable to normal accidents. How do you envision academic institutions utilizing the model of normal accident theory to train future journalists?
First, academic institutions need to understand the organization, structure and function of the contemporary newsroom. This isnít their fathersí newsroom and it probably wasnít the one they trained in years ago ñ if in fact they trained there. They need to study and understand (as journalists still do not) the interactions of technology, of the complications of staff and its many functions, of the objective of news organizations and of the culture of journalism ñ its mores, its values, its history and so forth. If and when they can do this, they need to instruct future journalists in how newsrooms actually work as opposed to how theyíre supposed to work in Journalism 101. They should train young journalists to be critical thinkers about their own profession as well as about the world at large (politics, economics, social issues, etc.). Most of all, they should train their students to think of journalism as a profession or craft--take your choice; Iím not choosy-- that serves a public trust in a way that shabby practice, shabby ethics and shabby thinking have no place. If the students can take those lessons with them, the decisions they make in journalism have a much higher chance of being the ìrightî ones and a lower chance of being the ones that sets off a train of disasters.