The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel received a powerful — if slightly hollow — vindication last weekend when the Food and Drug Administration backed away from its longstanding endorsement of the safety of the chemical bisphenol-A. The newspaper has been relentlessly going after BPA on safety grounds for a couple of years, with former science reporter Susanne Rust (who left in one of last year’s buyouts) and Watchdog Team member Meg Kissinger doingmuchof the heavy lifting, joined by other staffers from time to time. Their work, which helped expose the industry’s role in making FDA policy that for years exonerated the chemical,has won awards from the Society for Professional Journalists and other groups, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prizes last year.
The coverage the paper has given to the subject is an example of what ex-New York Times editor Howell Raines calls “flooding the zone.” And stories in Scientific American and Fast Company have reinforced the paper’s warnings about the chemical’s safety.
To be sure, skeptics seek to undermine the coverage by the JS and other media organizations, such as Consumer Reports. Most prominently, a self-styled media-watchdog group called the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), affiliated with George Mason University, maintains an archive that is a running critique of the stories. It’s worth noting, however, that the Madison-based Sourcewatch (part of the Center for Media and Democracy) has offered reasons to be skeptical of STATS’s objectivity.
The persistence that the Journal Sentinel has shown on the BPA story is absolutely essential to meaningful investigative reporting. Yet it can put a news organization in a no-win situation, creating an impression that it’s so committed to a particular reading of the facts that it might be overstating its case or ignoring contrary information. And when the editorial page weighs in on the topic, it can further contribute to that impression — however inaccurate.
The remedy isn’t to ignore the follow-up opportunities or for the editorial page to shut up, either. The problem simply underscores a news outlet’s obligation to be willing to second-guess itself and subject its own work to continuing scrutiny.
There’s another drawback to relentless follow-up: The more the paper devotes to continuing coverage of an old topic, the greater the risk that resources or space will crowd out new ones.
Pressroom continues to admire the work of the Journal Sentinel’s Watchdog team and the paper’s commitment to investigative reporting at a time when the news business is under siege. A year ago, though, we worried that disproportionate coverage of some stories could backfire by leaving some important stories uncovered.
With so much of what’s coming out of the team lately seeming to be follow-up stories, we’re still worried.
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The item above is filled with links elswhere. Linking is a key tool in the online presentation of news and other content. Indeed, can you imagine an online environment in which links aren’t pervasive?
Yet some news organizations are trying to prevent others from directly linking to their work. Jeff Jarvis , a leading voice in the task of building the new Internet media economy, argues that linking is an inherent right on the Internet– a formof free speech. Agree or disagree, his argument is intriguing to anyone who cares about where the media industry is going, and so is the discussion in the comments that follow.
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