Journalistic integrity

On July 29, I wrote this post about how KNPR, the Las Vegas public radio station, got the facts all wrong about online poker.

The same day, I emailed Kathryn LaTour, the UNLV professor who was on that show, telling her of the post and inviting any response she might have. No reply.

The slightly more interesting story is what happened with the radio station. I emailed the host of the program, Dave Berns, with this message:

Mr. Berns:

You got the legal facts about online gambling
completely wrong, repeatedly, during the 7/28 broadcast. I detail the errors in
a post on my poker blog here: http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2008/07/knpr-gets-it-wrong-wrong-wrong.html

If you have any comments to make in response to my post, I’d be
happy to add them as an addendum to the blog.

I think you owe your
listeners a retraction, an explanation, and an apology.

Mr. Berns replied quickly, within a couple of hours:

Thanks for listening and writing. Give me a little time to check into this.
If I'm wrong I will certainly correct it on the air. It wouldn't be the first
time I've made a mistake, and undoubtedly won't be the last. Bear with me, and
I'll get to it within a day or two.

Best,

Dave

This was encouraging.

But nothing came of it. So on August 9, I sent Mr. Berns another email, asking about what he had learned when he looked into the matter. On August 11, I got this reply:

Just got back from vacation after six days out of town. It's my pleasure to
nail this down.

Dave

Hmmm. This is starting to sound like a brush-off. But OK, I'll give him a chance.

Not too surprisingly, I did not hear back from Mr. Berns. So on August 22, I sent him one last email:

After more than three weeks, I have to assume that correcting errors isn’t
actually as important to you as you tried to suggest here [this was at the top
of his original response to me]. Or did I miss it at some point?

There has been no reply.

Thus it became obvious that Mr. Berns had zero interest in looking into whether he had given out erroneous information on his show. It is apparent to me that he lacks the journalistic integrity to check up on his own work when it is called into question. He simply doesn't care whether the things he says on his program are true or not. Furthermore, he lacks general personal integrity, as demonstrated by twice promising to explore the problem, yet then doing nothing about it. In short, neither his factual assertions nor his personal assurances mean anything.

So I tried going up the ladder. KNPR's web site lists Florence Rogers as the "President and General Manager." I emailed her about the situation. I included all of the above-mentioned correspondence, so that she could see that I made pretty reasonable attempts to resolve it with Mr. Berns directly. After quoting those exchanges, I asked Ms. Rogers these questions:

So now, given that history, my questions for you:

1. Do you
care enough about seeing that on-air errors get corrected to do anything about
this, since it seems apparent that Mr. Berns lacks sufficient journalistic
integrity to take care of it on his own?

2. Is there any reason
that I should think that the rest of your staff cares any more about getting
things right than Mr. Berns does? Put another way, this is the first time I have
attempted to get somebody on your staff to correct a factual misstatement, so I
have to assume that the kind of reaction I got (i.e., reassuring platitudes, but
zero action; basically a “bedbug letter”) was typical. Can you provide any
evidence that this is not so?

This was on August 27, three weeks ago today.

There has been no reply.

So my conclusion, inevitably, is that neither the on-air talent nor upper management at KNPR gives a rat's ass about getting things right, or correcting false information that they broadcast.

Sadly, this is typical of my experiences with news outlets generally. There are four general areas in which I consider myself a lot more knowledgeable than most of the world: poker, firearms, medicine, and Mormonism (the religion I was raised in). It's kind of an odd assortment of things to be more or less expert about, but that's how life has worked out for me.

The majority of the time that one of these subjects is in the news, there is at least one unambiguously false or misleading statement in the story. On at least a dozen occasions over the past, oh, six or seven years I have attempted to get a reporter and/or editor and/or publisher to issue a correction, after pointing them to easily available, reliable sources that demonstrate the error. Not once has any news outlet responded with a quick retraction/correction. In fact, I can only recall one time that a correction ever got made, and it was a few months later, and only after more than 12 contacts on my part to different people within the newspaper hierarchy.

It appears that KNPR is the same as the rest. They just don't care about factual accuracy. They will, of course, endlessly claim that they do, but their actions--or, rather, inactions--prove otherwise. Yet several times a year they spend day after day of air time asking me to send them money because of what a valuable "news and information" service they provide. Yeah, right.