How's this for ethics ... TV edition

No, you shouldn't.
But if I go to a golf tournament, show up after the players are done, then ask the winner to putt on a hole he didn't play so I can take a photo and use it as main art where I explicitly say "Here's so and so putting on 18 at saturday's match play championship" and my story says he never played the hole, than yes, you should.
I'm not threatened by the TV station, believe me. They've never beaten me on a story, I have no desire to do TV (face for radio, body for no one) and I'd rather work with them as opposed to the station we have an alleged "partnership" with.
What the reporter did is something that should offend everyone. Our jobs are to report facts, not purposely deceive the readers/viewers because we failed to do our job correctly.

 

Well said, Rhody.

 

If the newspaper did it, the TV station would be all over it.

 

Frank, you're dead on.
That said, I feel like a fucking narc right now. I e-mailed the sports director to talk to him on the phone and I feel like I have to apologize for even asking to talk to him.
Of course, then there's the other part of me that wants this to run in my paper and online, get picked up by a local blog or something and have it break out huge.

 

Wait, did we ever find out if the broadcast explicitly said "here is the winning putt..." or was it just kind of background B roll?

What if you're doing a story on, say, the 2001 Mariners 10 years later. You run a shot of Ichiro from 2002 and put a caption that says "Ichiro was a key player in 2001." you aren't explicitly saying the pic is from 01. Just that it's Ichiro.

 

I suppose it would be defendable as B-roll, but still, it seems like a slippery slope to me. If you're showing footage of two golfers hitting some putts, and you're talking about a tournament that happened that day, I don't think it's entirely ethical to link the two without a disclaimer. i.e. "You can see June Smith here in some file footage after the match," etc.

My own experience with this and the local TV people: I do a story on identity thieves in a simple police log. Using the victim's credit card, they send flowers to the victim, complete with a card that says "thanks for ur money." Local TV airs a segment with the card on camera... except according to the police department, there is no card. Victim (who I called to confirm) said she threw it away.

Back to the golf, even if the reporter is late, even having them re-do a hole seems like a lazy or unimaginative way out. Why not just film a short interview, or have them interacting with family and friends for the B-roll? For what it's worth, I don't see the clip on the station's website, but I'm not sure if it was ever there in the first place. (They don't always have every story available online, IIRC.)

 

Did the TV reporter not have a cell phone? When she got there and realized she had missed the action, she should have called her boss and said, "Hey, I covered the other assignment, was late getting here, they finished early ... what do you want me to do?"

 

This reporter has a bright future with Fox News.

 

My temper got the best of me in my younger years, when I would immediately come out guns-a-blazing over incidents like this.

Now I rely on the 24-hour rule and give myself the benefit of a night's sleep before making my decision. And in this case I probably would have still called the news director and pointed out that the recreated footage was not the right way to go because it was at least misleading and probably a little worse.

We don't get to impose out standards on other media (I'd like to think that newspaper standards remain a bit higher than most other media even though I operate in a web-only world these days), but there's nothing wrong with pointing out to the TV guy that one of his people may have crossed one of their own un-crossable lines. I'd want to know if one of my people was taking a similar shortcut.

 

No kidding.

You can't decry the "Blue Wall of Silence" or doctors that don't expose the worst among themselves and then make excuses for journalistic malpractice.

A free press is guaranteed by our constitution. Those rights come with an obligation.

We need the press to shine a light on corruption and cover ups.

Does what this station did threaten that? No. But, a mindset that would excuse and forgive it does. And, a "code" that would intimidate someone from exposing practices of this sort certainly does.

 

TV asked the girls to re-enact an event. That's not B roll.

 

Been trying to avoid chiming in on another "saving the world from the TV people" thread, but apparently I'm failing.

If it was, in fact, shot as a re-enactment and presented as real video of the tournament, that's wildly unethical. People get fired for that. It's the type of shit people do in their first job before they know any better.

If it was merely used as b-roll of the people involved, it's not unethical. It's stupid, but it's not unethical.

I understand the feeling that you've failed if you are sent out to shoot something and you don't get it... but bottom line, if the tournament was a big deal to the station, they would have sent someone before it ended. You get sound with the winner, you go back to the station, and you make the best of it.

As for the "ratting out" to the sports director, I don't have a huge problem with it either way. I'd be much more inclined to deal with the person one-on-one instead of going to their boss, but YMMV.