The fiasco over the firing of Shirley Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture could become part of our units on press law and ethics. It's a classic example of information taken out of context, compounded by a failure to take the time to investigate and discover what happened prior to two minutes of video and after. With a new school year about to begin, the inevitable rumors, half truths and outright fabrications of an excited student body (not to mention the teachers!) will begin again.
Whether our students are working on newspaper or online, we need to remind them of the need to thoroughly investigate "the news" before rushing to post or publish. We may or may not want to get into what the whole mess has to do with race in America, but everyone can agree that we need to get into how the media can distort the truth.
We need to remind our students that, as Carl Bernstein once defined it: "Journalism is the best attainable version of the truth." Sadly, the professional media, the White House, the blogsphere... pretty much everyone did not provide readers with the best attainable version of the truth in the case of Shirley Sherrod.
We can do better.
1 comment:
well said! i agree that the decision could be a point we all look back on and say, that was the first sign...
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