Kicking It Old-School – The phone
After religiously watching the Sunday talking-head programs – CNN, "Meet The Press," "This Week," "Face the Nation" – discuss the Shirley Sherrod issue, I found one comment by Face the Nation’s Bob Schieffer really brought the issue home: Check the facts and pick up the phone.
Journalists, editors and copy editors have tried-and-true rules for doing their fact-checking: Assume nothing. Get confirmations. Be accurate. Be thorough. Be fair. Check and double-check information. Often, even in our digital era, this work will be done on the telephone. Schieffer, a self-described “old media” journalist, was taken aback by the lack of simple effort from some of his colleagues.
Yes, it sounds a bit old-school. But investing in a few moments of first-person Q and A will provide more insight than any string of emails and Tweets. I did it when I was a reporter. I do it now in my PR work. I never assume a thing.
When Andrew Breitbart’s now-infamous Sherrod video went viral and then mainstream, a simple call to Sherrod would have made all the difference in the word. The conversation could have gone a little like this:
‘Hi, I’m (insert name here) with (insert media outlet here) and I’m writing a story about your firing (or insert other angle here). I’ve watched Breitbart’s video. Do you think that you were represented fairly in that video? Answer from Sherrod: ‘No! That wasn’t the entire video. Please go to (insert source) and review the whole thing in its entirety. I was misrepresented.”
A Columbia Journalism Review story “After the Storm: How the Sherrod story came up in print” provides some insight on the story, but it goes even deeper – actually questioning why folks from the Obama Administration to the NAACP were so quick to react and how journalists missed the mark.
There are many teachable moments from this, but I’ve always on the side of being inquisitive, asking questions and checking the authenticity of information. Yes, I know in a social media world this may seem old-school, but that’s how I roll.
If you’d like to reach to me, please feel free to call at 919-882-1979.
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