"It was to assure his readers they could believe what they read that, in 1913, at the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer created a Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play. In a 1984 article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Casandra Tate described how the World's first ombudsman noticed a pattern in the newspaper's reporting on shipwrecks: each such story featured a cat that had survived. When the ombudsman asked the reporter about this curious coincidence, he was told:
One of those wrecked ships had a cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat a feature of my story, while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck, there was no cat but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take a chance, and put the cat in. I wrote the report, leaving out the cat, and then I was severely chided for being beaten. Now when there is a shipwreck all of us always put in the cat."
No comments:
Post a Comment