Feb. 3, Tony Pederson, Professor of Journalism at SMU Dallas, for a piece lamenting the insensitive way some social media and news organizations cover breaking big stories such as the tragic death of Kobe Bryant and others in the helicopter crash. Published in the Austin American-Statesman: http://bit.ly/386vRGY
The controversy over the suspension and rapid reinstatement of a Washington Post reporter after a social media firestorm over coverage of Kobe Bryant’s death illustrates all too well news in the digital age. In the hours after the report that the NBA legend had died in a helicopter crash near Los Angeles, reporter Felicia Sonmez sent a tweet with a link to a story on a years-old sexual assault allegation.
Bryant in 2003 was accused of assaulting a 19-year-old hotel employee in Colorado. The criminal charges were dropped. A civil lawsuit resulted in an undisclosed settlement. Bryant maintained the sex was consensual. It should be noted that Bryant in 2001 had married Vanessa Lane, the mother of his four children. One of the daughters, Gianna, 13, also died in the crash Sunday, as did seven others. . .
By Tony Pederson
The controversy over the suspension and rapid reinstatement of a Washington Post reporter after a social media firestorm over coverage of Kobe Bryant’s death illustrates all too well news in the digital age. In the hours after the report that the NBA legend had died in a helicopter crash near Los Angeles, reporter Felicia Sonmez sent a tweet with a link to a story on a years-old sexual assault allegation.
Bryant in 2003 was accused of assaulting a 19-year-old hotel employee in Colorado. The criminal charges were dropped. A civil lawsuit resulted in an undisclosed settlement. Bryant maintained the sex was consensual. It should be noted that Bryant in 2001 had married Vanessa Lane, the mother of his four children. One of the daughters, Gianna, 13, also died in the crash Sunday, as did seven others.
The tweet by Sonmez linked to a Daily Beast story on the sexual assault allegation published in 2016. In an email released by Sonmez, Post executive editor Marty Baron wrote: “A real lack of judgment to tweet this. Please stop. You’re hurting this institution by doing this.”
Perhaps reacting to thousands of negative and often threatening tweets, the paper placed Sonmez on administrative leave. The paper’s Newspaper Guild protested the decision, saying she should have been offered protection in light of the threats. The Washington Post isn’t the first news organization to cope with ethical complexities of social media, and it won’t be the last. The paper made the right decision reinstating Sonmez.
The day after the suspension, I posed the question to a class of 90 undergraduate students in my Media Ethics course at SMU Dallas. The consensus: the reporter shouldn’t have sent out the tweet; clear sentiment that the suspension of the reporter was overreaction. I agree with the students on both counts. Any discussion of the sexual assault allegation would have been better handled with time and thoughtful consideration of the full picture of Bryant’s life. Unfortunately, the digital age doesn’t allow for that.
So much of what happens now is a digital moment. Good, solid reporting that is factual and sensitive gets overwhelmed in the news cycle. The mistakes and the controversies linger. There were factual mistakes made by mainstream media as well as social media. We’ve gotten accustomed to those mistakes since Twitter became a prime news source. And the website TMZ announced quickly, before any family could be notified, that Kobe Bryant was dead. TMZ has never played by the norms of traditional media.
The Newspaper Guild statement protesting the suspension noted that it is the responsibility of journalists to publish the whole picture of individuals and institutions, including the negatives. And that’s true. Yet social media seems only to encourage and exacerbate overreaction and, frequently, anger.
Mainstream news media, print and broadcast, encourage reporters and editors to engage in social media. Social media is used to link to stories that can build audience and alleviate the economic cataclysm that has struck many news organizations, especially newspapers. That miscues and disastrous communications occur when responsible journalists are encouraged to make snap communications over social media should be no surprise.
We have now had the 24-hour news cycle wrought by cable news for more than a generation. The idea that news was never complete and got on the air immediately with little or no vetting became the standard. Not only did reporting and journalism change, our very perception of the news changed.
The same dramatic change is now taking place with social media and digital technology. The standards and ethics of the past no longer mean anything. News and reaction are more instantaneous and less vetted than cable news. We interpret major news events through the brief sentences that often have truncated spellings, millennial-style initialisms and emojis, and horrible grammar. Whatever we may think of these changes, they are here to stay.
Pederson is professor of journalism and holds the Belo Foundation Endowed Distinguished Chair in Journalism at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He teaches media ethics.