WASHINGTON — Know your audience.
Journalism students are taught this maxim early and often, but there’s a corollary to the lesson that most reporters learn quickly through experience: Your most critical audience members are often the people you write about. And perhaps nowhere are people more critical of press coverage than in Washington.
I don’t mean to imply that your most important audience members are your sources; they’re simply the most likely to dissect and analyze every nuance of the stories you write. I’ve learned this lesson a few times now, most recently a few weeks ago when I attended a panel of legal academics at Georgetown University’s law school.
The panel dealt with the topic of medical malpractice and tort reform. The participants asserted that, while not perfect, “med-mal” and litigation associated with malpractice were not major drivers of rising health insurance costs, as some politicians have postulated.
In covering the story, I followed the rote note-taking procedures that most reporters rely on. I took down the panelists’ statements, and afterward I asked participants for clarification on points I thought might be unclear or misinterpreted. Then I wrote my story.
Two days later, I received a phone call from one of the panel members, dismayed over what he perceived as a significant misquote that required correction.
During the panel discussion, this participant had spoken about the total cost of health care in the United States – roughly $2.2 trillion – and maintained that costs associated with medical malpractice accounted for, at most, “several percentage points” of that total.
In my notes, which spanned the general statements and a question and answer period after the panel had concluded, I had the speaker putting that several-percentage-point contribution at somewhere between $50 billion and $60 billion. Later in the newsroom, I checked the numbers and everything jibed.
In my story, I paraphrased the panelist as saying that costs associated with medical malpractice were roughly $55 billion of the $2.2 trillion spent on health care. I did this to clarify and define the numbers for my readers.
The panelist did not agree with my paraphrase. He emphasized that he’d only said “several percentage points” and had not given an actual dollar figure. Although he agreed that several percentage points of the total would be in line with the $55 billion figure, he felt that my suggestion that he had given a hard-dollar figure was inaccurate.
I did not have a recording of the event, and the panel’s recording only covered the general statements of the discussion, not the questions afterward. During the general statements, the participant I’d paraphrased had not given the $50-60 billion figure.
So, after a lot of back-and-forthing among my source, my editor and me, a clarification was issued. In the end, although I felt that my story was fair and accurate, I did not have a recording of the statement in question.
On Wednesday, the New York Times covered a story I thought relevant to my experience.
After a recent visit made by Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy to Dalton high school in Manhattan, the justice’s office insisted on prior approval of any stories the school’s newspaper planned to publish about the event. The school complied, and a representative for Kennedy approved the story with “a couple of minor tweaks” meant to, according to the Times’ story, “better reflect the meaning the justice had intended to convey.”
I thought this story about Kennedy underscored a few of the lessons I’d gathered from my experience at the Georgetown panel.
First, even the most careful and practiced speaker, familiar with all of the vagaries of language and critical interpretation, will occasionally say something other than he or she had intended. Ask for clarification.
Second, you can never assume that your source will agree with your interpretation of events, even if you’re sure you got it right. If you don’t have a recording, it’s simply your word versus theirs.
So when appropriate, record everything. No matter how mundane or anodyne.
And of course, know your audience. Lawyers — and Supreme Court justices — are going to be more picky about what you write.
Markham Heid will graduate from the Medill School of Journalism in December. He currently covers health and health care policy. He wrote this opinion piece for Washington Reporting 2.0., an occasional column about the experience of reporting.