A Member of the Media on the "Gloucester Pregnancy Pact" Reporting

I have blogged here before about Capt. Joe's excellent Good Morning Gloucester blog. Joe is doing an outstanding job of letting the world know how beautiful, interesting, and diverse Gloucester is. Recently he was contacted (because of his blog) by a writer from the magazine Marie Claire. He has a good article about it on his blog. The article elicited an interesting response from Janelle, a local member of the media, who posted the following. I am repeating it here so more people can goto Joe's blog and read about this. I think it is important:

I am a member of the media and also a Gloucester native, and I applaud you for telling it like it is. There is, however, a little more to the story than will ever meet the public eye. I hope you don’t mind if I use this as my soap box for a minute.

An interesting point is, not only did the media choose to regurgitate an inaccurate story; they shirked any opportunity for getting it right. While certainly is their undeniable fault, I only place about 90 of the blame on them. To the general public, I place the remaining 10 percent.

I was in touch with producers from CNN on June 18, the day the story broke, and had a 1 p.m. telephone meeting with them, at which time I was supposed to provide them with contacts in the community who would talk about what they’ve seen regarding Gloucester’s teen pregnancy issues. I let them know that I could most-likely get them in touch with students, teachers, and school committee members, but at that time was told CNN felt greater pressure to get the story reported in a timely fashion (i.e. by 4 p.m.) as opposed to digging deep for absolute accuracy.

I blame CNN for not taking the opportunity to get the right information out there, but I also blame the American public for their unreasonable expectations on the news media.

I regularly hear people lambasting the Gloucester Daily Times (an excellent community newspaper, in my opinion) for reporting on things “a day after they’ve passed.” It should be noted that the GDT never once dipped their toe in the public bloodbath: they never once sensationalized the story. And, as I recall, the fact that they refused to use the term “pregnancy pact” was met with a fair amount of criticism from the Gloucester community when the story went national. So much criticism, as a matter of fact, that editor Ray Lamont had to address the criticism in an editorial.

I absolutely agree that if the media wants our trust they need to get the facts straight, but when they’re writing for a population has the attention span of a gnat, they are faced with an impossible choice: take 24-hours to fully research a topic and risk losing readers, or do the best you can with impossible deadlines and sources that don’t call back to appease readers who want a feature written on today’s story yesterday.

If we want fair and accurate reporting we need to allow the media time to fully explore the information at hand. We need to place greater importance on accuracy than on having our news fed to us at Mach-3 speed.

It should be noted that Time Magazine most-likely had weeks to craft their story. I hate to throw stones but I do wonder how they could have made such a gross error.

And hey, Joe, I don’t criticize your comment to Marie Claire one bit. As a matter of fact, I think what you said was dead on. It’s just a shame that other news organizations didn’t have the same luxury of sending a journalist to Gloucester for a four-hour tour. If we allowed them that, maybe we could go back to regarding the press as the Fourth Estate.

Incidentally, if you go to Joe's blog you can subscribe to receive regular updates.

Thanks for reading.