With journalism now living forever on the Internet, publishers are fielding requests to purge stories from their archives for reasons of law, ethics, or privacy, Dan Watson writes in Columbia Journalism Review. "Across the board, editors refuse to redact a story because a source regrets something he or she said," Watson says. "But is that fair to sources? Today, a print past isn’t hidden in newspaper archives or on microfilm. Even old content is just a click away."
Issues in science writing
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has pledged not to punish journalists who name physicians appearing in the National Practitioner Data Bank's public data file, the Association of Health Care Journalists reports. ACHJ, NASW, and four other journalism groups protested last year when the department temporarily cut off access to the public file after a physician's attorney complained about a reporter's use of the data in a story.
Two freedom-of-information advocates discuss the Obama Administration's record in the Columbia Journalism Review and sound disappointed. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Executive Director Lucy Dalglish: “The Obama administration at least says the right things. But there’s somewhat of a disconnect between what we consider to be 'transparency' and what they think that means.” Also: Jennifer Lynch, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Mostly it's that there isn't much of it, Stefanie Friedhoff writes in the Spring Nieman Reports: "Between 2001 and 2011, foreign health aid to developing nations quadrupled from $7.6 billion to over $28 billion. During the same period, 18 newspapers and two newspaper chains in the United States closed all their foreign bureaus." Other problems: Lack of training, scarce "breaking news," and the sheer complexity of many global health issues.
Mostly the latter, 146 Washington reporters say in a survey from the Society of Professional Journalists. Lead author Carolyn S. Carlson: “Reporters in Washington are struggling to give the public an objective view of the federal government, but are running into interference rather than assistance from the very people hired by the government to help them.” Full report. Comment from AHCJ, Poynter.
Newspapers have cut 28% of their jobs in the past five years, Robert Niles writes in an OJR post. Yet journalism schools still accept students, training workers for a dying trade. "Given that job market, why would any students want to major in print journalism? More importantly — why would any ethical college or university allow those students to do so?" Niles asks. A response from Mona Zhang on 10,000 Words. Related.
Teaching hospitals did poorly in Medicare's new patient safety data ratings, and the objections aren't at all spurious, Jordan Rau of Kaiser Health News tells CJR: "These metrics, which measure such things as serious blood clots and accidental cuts and tears, were created for a different purpose. The original aim was to help hospitals look at and track internal problems. They were not set up to compare one hospital with another." Rau's story.
When the science writer said the British Chiropractic Association "happily promotes bogus treatments," the group had to react, its newsletter says (PDF). "For years, chiropractic had been castigated in a succession of critical articles, but here was a published article which had explicitly named a chiropractic association and had made defamatory comments about it," its president writes. Singh's co-author Edzard Ernst responds in the Guardian.
Curtis Brainard takes aim at a recent Washington Post health section story in a CJR Observatory post about deep vein thrombosis, in which blog clots form in the legs and can travel to the lungs, resulting in deadly embolisms. The story's author, John Donnelly, "badly mischaracterized the dangers of long-distance airplane travel," Brainard writes, citing statistics from the College of Chest Physicians that warn against using aspirin or anticoagulants to prevent DVT.
Generally it takes a subpoena for the government to do searches or seizures of a journalist's work product or documents. But it's an open question whether the protections of the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 also extend to documents stored on servers managed by the likes of Google or Amazon, Jonathan W. Peters writes in the Columbia Journalism Review. "We no longer live in the 1980-world where the PPA was passed. It needs to enter the digital era," Peters says.