By Ralph E. Hanson
May 25, 2005
Charleston Daily Mail
As a journalist, author, and teacher, I am generally more comfortable doing the interviewing and writing than being the subject of an article. Once in a while, it can be informative for a journalist to sit on the other side and see what it is like to be a source.
It all started a week ago when I received an e-mail from a librarian friend pointing me to a column by Michelle Malkin at the townhall.com web site. He wrote, “Ralph, I saw you mentioned in this article. I assumed you were notified?”
Not only had I not been notified about the article, I hadn’t ever spoken with Malkin or anyone who works for her.
Malkin is a popular conservative commentator, and her column contained the usual charges that the press has an anti-military bias and is insensitive to the safety of American troops. The column was provoked by Newsweek retracting a brief item from its “Periscope” section that claimed American soldiers guarding the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated a copy of the Qur’an by flushing it down a toilet.
Malkin had a long laundry list of what she considered to be anti-military bias, and among her examples was the March issue of Harper’s magazine. The magazine’s cover story was on military deserters, and it featured a computer-altered photo of seven Marine recruits at Parris Island, S.C. The problem was none of the recruits on the cover was a deserter.
In her column Malkin writes:
As Ralph Hansen, associate professor of journalism at West Virginia University and a rare member of academia with his head screwed on straight, observed: "Portraying honorable soldiers as deserters is clearly inappropriate. And I don't see any way Harper's could claim that they weren't portraying the young Marines as deserters. A cover is more than just art. I think that someone had a great idea for a cover illustration and forgot that he or she was dealing with images of real people."
Overall, I would say this is a pretty accurate portrayal of my views on the Harper’s case, other than Malkin misspelling my name. But several questions remained: How did Malkin get my quote without speaking with me? Should she have verified my name? Should she have contacted me prior to running the quote? And did my quote really support her position that the press is biased against the military?
The quote originated from an excellent article about the Harper’s case written in March by Charleston Daily Mail reporter Jake Stump, who interviewed me. One of the soldier’s portrayed on the Harper’s cover grew up in West Virginia, and Mr. Stump was writing about the family’s reaction. He called me to comment on the ethics of the situation. Incidentally, my name was spelled correctly in his story.
The story was then picked up by the Associated Press, which distributed a condensed version of it. The AP story quoted me correctly and in context, but my name was spelled wrong. At the bottom of the AP story was an attribution saying information for the story was drawn from the Daily Mail.
Malkin apparently took the quote from the AP story, along with the misspelled name. But now a new bit of distortion came in. Malkin used the quote to show how the press dislikes the military, while in reality it was part of a newspaper story defending the soldiers involved. Rather than being an example of how the media dislikes the military, it was an example of the press defending the military.
Anytime I tell people I’m a journalism professor, they immediately tell me a story about how a journalist got his or her story wrong. My experience was different. What I found was that the original reporter got the story right. But like a children’s game of “telephone,” the story slowly got distorted the more times it was retold.
Hanson is an associate professor of journalism at West Virginia University.