Old news

The NYT had another plagiarism issue, this time the reporter, Alexei Barrionuevo, was caught lifting direct copy from the Miami Herald. It's a real indictment on the Times that of all of the newspapers its reporter might plagiarize he chose the Miami Herald. That's like cheating off of the dumbest guy in the class.

Historian: The Herald ripped me off

Herald Watch has received an email from Latino Studies professor Antonio de la Cova Ph.D. in which he alleges that The Miami Herald used certain materials that it obtained from his web site without attribution.

The article in question is about Gerald Patrick Hemming, a man who the Herald's John Dorschner describes as an "adventurer" who died last week. Herald.com often links to related articles and materials it posts on its server in a box next to the actual story. In this case, it links to a court document which de la Cova says was lifted from his web site LatinAmericanStudies.org.

Also linked from Herald.com is a Herald article about Hemming from 1963 but the document is not from the Herald's own archive but rather from Professor de la Cova's archive at LatinAmericanStudies.org. Notice that de la Cova publishes the Herald's article on his site and gives attribution. The Herald simply grabbed materials (though the copyright in this case belongs to the Herald) from de la Cova's site. They simply printed the page from de la Cova's site and scanned it. He made their research easy for them and they won't even acknowledge him.

Likewise this document posted at Herald.com also comes from LatinAmericanStudies.org.

And this document was also taken from LatinAmericanStudies.org.

de la Cova concludes his email by saying:

All posted documentation was ripped off my website [page] on Hemming without any credit. The Hemming photo, which is also on Gordon Winslow's website, is properly credited to Winslow.

Herald makes contribution to Clinton campaign...

Ombudsman wrestles with consequences.

Herald Watch somehow missed the latest column by the Herald's ombudsman in his capacity as ombudsman.

Apparently the Herald found itself on the outside of an event for Hillary Clinton and had no way to get in except to buy its way in for $50. This is the subject much wrenching of hair and gnashing of teeth on the part of Schumacher-Matos, who consulted with an expert in journalistic ethics:

So, I called Robert M. Steele, a journalism professor and ethics expert at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg. ''I'm very uncomfortable with the thought of news organizations buying their way into campaign events,'' he said. ``Disclosing it doesn't make it go away. It's still a campaign contribution.''

He is right, and The Miami Herald's own written guidelines prohibit staffers from working or contributing to political campaigns. But guidelines are just that: guidelines. There comes a time for editorial judgment, and that is what was called for in this unusual situation.

The issue now is what to do going forward. Bill Richardson will come soon for a ''fundraiser.'' The reporters and editors I talked to are not totally clear on what the policy will be, which indicates a need for a written directive. For Gyllenhaal, it's simple. ''We'll be going to anything that looks like a rally,'' he said, and The Miami Herald will pay if it has to. He later qualified that by saying the paper would take into account the importance of the candidate and the event, and if the paper appeared to be paying inordinately for any one candidate.

I think this approach best serves the reader. We will all now monitor how the paper lives up to its word.

Again the ombudsman seems noncommittal. Why so wishy washy, doesn't this man have an opinion of his own?

Something else in the column was curious:

Benn [the reporter that paid his way in] was asked if he was comfortable with the assignment. ''I would have had a problem if I had been asked to sneak in, representing myself as a member of the catering staff,'' he said.

Why should a reporter be so uncomfortable with sneaking into a political event? I thought these were supposed to be truth seekers. Journalists around the world risk their lives daily to get stories out. What could have possibly happened to him had he been caught doing his job? I guess the thought of a uniformed security guard escorting him out was too stressful.

Another thing I don't get is why the Ombudsman is so concerned about the money paid to attend and therefore report on the event. Isn't the fact that the paper actually ENDORSES candidates a bigger conflict of interest?

It strikes me that these folks make up the rules as they go along.

Marti Moonlighter speaks out about ethics

Helen Aguirre Ferré, the editor of Miami's second largest Spanish language daily, Diario las Americas, has joined the blogging ranks. Her first two posts are a defense of herself with regards the Marti Moonlighters scandal of a year ago (in English and Spanish). The last paragraph reveals that the text of her post may have been given as speech at a conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in August. The name of the panel discussion which Aguirre Ferré moderated was “Of Propaganda, Patriotism and Patronage: The Legal, Ethical and Practical Implications of Journalists Working with Government Agencies”. Joining her on the panel was syndicated columnist and fellow Martí Moonlighter Carlos Alberto Montaner as well as Clark Hoyt, the man who was brought in by McClatchy to investigate the scandal as a one-time-only ombudsman.

In the speech/post she poses many of the questions and addresses many of the issues that have been raised here at Herald Watch. Still there are some important thoughts I thought I'd highlight:

A study published in 1999 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors analyzed the codes of ethics of 33 different newspapers. Many of the codes were standard fare: it is inappropriate to accept gifts, travel junkets, or money for a story, for example. However, many did not include subjects such as correcting errors, privacy issues, deception, and plagiarism. Only 1/5th addressed the difficult but important division between the newsroom and the advertising department.

Certainly, many if not all of the news organizations analyzed have updated their codes. What we learn from this, however, is that each news organization has their independent ethical guidelines unique to their news organizations.

Therefore, it came as an enormous surprise to a number of prominent south Florida journalists who were targeted for violating a supposed code of ethics of The Miami Herald forbidding their journalists from receiving compensation from the U.S. government news agency like Radio and TV Marti, although it was not prohibited by the companies non-Herald journalists worked for.

Of the eleven journalists sited [sic], only 2 were employed by the Spanish language El Nuevo Herald full-time, one was a free lance employee. The other journalists cited in the article who work in either in television, radio or print, were employed by companies who do not agree that there is a conflict of interest. [...]

Why then target the other journalists in this story, which was hardly a news story, it was well know [sic] that each and every one had a participation in Radio and TV Marti? Was this not in reality a personnel problem The Miami Herald needed to deal with privately with their employees instead of making it the first five-column news story on the front page of the newspaper?[...]

When The Miami Herald reporter, Oscar Corral, called me to inform me of the story he was doing and its imminent publication, I asked him if he had analyzed the content of my work, and he said no. How then can a journalist question the ethics of my work if he or she has never seen it?[...]

That this perception exists, when the news content or work has never been scrutinized by those who accuse the organization of being propagandistic is unjust and disheartening. [...]

Certainly, this is not the same perception held toward Voice of America, for example. There services are held in the highest esteem for reasons as yet unclear to me, although I have no reason to doubt that. In fact, the Washington bureau chief for the Hartford Courant worked for nearly a decade for Voice of America, with a similar stipend that the some of the journalist for Radio and TV Marti received. Yet when that story was disclosed, I do not recall reading one news story that accused that distinguished journalist of being a propagandist for the U.S. government. [...]

The community understood that this was “gotcha” journalism at its worse and it was no longer going to tolerate the lack of respect and defamation for anyone who is identified with taking a position against the communist government of Cuba. [...]

Fairness and accuracy are two key components of serious journalism. Both were sadly missing in the story TMH did on the journalists who work for Radio and TV Marti. They impugned the reputations of distinguished colleagues without regard to the harm that could have resulted to them personally or their professional reputations, the most important resource a journalist has in dealing with the public. [...]

One issue still remains unresolved, at least in the minds of many in the news gathering community, how is it that the Cuban government, announced the disclosure of this Herald story a few weeks in advance? It was aired on the government’s roundtable [sic] discussion program La Mesa Redonda and is on tape. How could the Cuban government know of the The Miami Herald’s investigative piece before hand? Your guess would be just as valid as mine would.

Putney does the hokey pokey, Herald plays hide and seek

He puts his left foot in, he takes his left foot out.

From the "I haven't found the time to blog about this yet but should have" file...

Channel 10 political analyst and Herald contributor Michael Putney took a position with an investment bank as a PR hack and then decided against it. He had been planning on keeping both of his journo gigs while writing letters and press releases for the investment bank. In finally not accepting the position Putney avoided further scrutiny and debate about whether its proper for a journalist to collect a paycheck from an entity he might someday have to cover. The question became how realistic is it that he would in fact have to cover that entity and that industry.

Other local journos are working as spokespersons for companies that are ostensibly out of their area of expertise like Oscar Haza, the Spanish language political analyst for WQBA and channel 41 who is shilling for a local medicare HMO.

I don't know what really make of the situation but my instinct tells me that if journalism isn't paying you enough money then you need to make a career change. It's unseemly to have supposedly impartial and unbiased people using their credibility to sell products. The same principal behind the conflict of interest firings during the Marti Moonlighters scandal would seem to be at play here. Avoid the appearance of...

Interestingly the intitial Herald.com story about Putney taking the PR gig has been replaced by the one announcing he won't take the gig. In a sense the Herald erased the news it had published on its site. I wonder how ethical that is. The Herald should have updated the story with a second piece and not written over the original piece.

Better Late than Never

Perhaps someone at 1 Herald Plaza reads Herald Watch. In fact, my site meter statistics confirm that several people there do.

The following line was added to the online version of a recent op ed piece about the Carnival Center written by Michael Hardy after I and other bloggers noted that the piece did not identify the connection its author has with the center:

Michael C. Hardy is the president and CEO of the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts.

Well thanks for sharing that bit of info several days after the fact. Notably, the correction was never noted in the corrections section of the web site, it was just quietly made.

Ethics in journalism

The Miami Herald has been struggling with that for some time now. It's interesting to read a column they published on Monday about the issue.

The column was written by Edward Wasserman, the Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, and is about publishing "good stories from bad sources" and uses the BALCO steroids case and reporting done by the San Francisco chronicle as a backdrop. Mr. Wasserman says that:

It's indeed a problem, which you might call The Dilemma of the Evil but Truthful Source: When a journalist receives solid information of clear public importance, which is given in order to advance a private stratagem that is both morally questionable and known to the reporter. The question is whether the journalist's professional obligation to report that information entitles him to ignore that unsavory private agenda.

To his credit Mr. Wasserman states:

The short answer, I believe, is that it doesn't. Journalists aren't free to act as if that private agenda doesn't exist. They may well do the story anyway. But I think they must accept that they'll be complicit in that private stratagem, and must conclude that the wrongness of that complicity is redeemed by the wider public benefit of the secrets it unlocks.

The problem as I see it is not so much the agenda that the source in this case (a lawyer that leaked secret grand jury testimony to try to obtain a dismissal for his client) had, as much as is the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle knowingly published false accusations, about the nature of the leaks, made by the leaker himself.

This can't be ethical under any circumstances.

The Herald's evolving ethical standards

Friday's Herald featured an article by Oscar Corral about South Florida journalists that were on the government payroll as well. The journalists in question were moonlighting for the Office of Cuba Broadcasting that is responsible for Radio Marti and TV Marti. The two media outlets are intended to transmit uncensored information to Cuba where there is no legal independent media. Neither outlet is transmitted in the U.S. however live feeds can be heard/seen on the organization's web site.

Corral consulted experts in journalistic ethics who explain why working for a government agency is a taboo for journalists.

Journalism ethics experts called the payments a fundamental conflict of interest. Such violations undermine the credibility of reporters to objectively cover key issues affecting U.S. policy toward Cuba, they said.

Among the various journalists and commentators mentioned in the piece were three associated with El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish language newspaper that is the sister paper of The Miami Herald. Two of these journalists were employees who were fired after Corral's investigation. The third was a freelancer named Olga Connor. The Herald has ended its relationship with Connor as well because of the story.

Setting aside my personal feelings about whether there was truly a conflict of interest among these journalists, there appears to be something fishy going on here.

A fellow blogger discovered that 4 years ago the Herald published an article by Elaine De Valle about Radio Marti's (then) new president Salvador Lew and how he was hiring many of his friends to work with him. One of the friends mentioned in the piece was none other than Olga Connor.

Olga Connor, a columnist at El Nuevo Herald who hosts an arts program on Radio Martí, is a friend [of Lew's].

Not only that, Ms. De Valle even reported that Connor was being paid "$440 a show" for her twice-weekly radio show.

At the time, it seems, The Herald had no problem with Connor's activities on Radio Marti because she continued to work for Radio Marti and El Nuevo Herald ever since.

So one has to ask oneself whether The Herald didn't realize that Connor's employment by Radio Marti posed a "conflict of interest" back in March of 2002 (which they should have if the violation was so egregious) or if there is some other reason that the paper decided to take action against Connor and her Radio Marti colleagues now?