Houston Chronicle reader representative James T. Campbell is quoted by Marvin Lake in a Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot commentary on the Dan Rather controversy:
Aside from damaged credibility, James T. Campbell, reader representative at the Houston Chronicle, sees another fallout from the CBS debacle.
“I think what will result is mainstream media, unfortunately, taking a more cautious approach to doing stories that may be remotely damaging to Bush or his administration.”
Interestingly, Campbell sees a “paradox at play here. People who consider themselves liberal may have some skepticism about the media in general, but had no problems with this particular story because they probably saw it as helping their candidate.
“Ultimately, any time you have a story like this blow up because of shoddy journalism or protectionism it hurts all of us. It means we must go the extra step to vet bias and safeguard our credibility.”
One way of safeguarding credibility is to be more responsive to readers and critics, via email and in print. Indeed, the writer of the column excerpted above is his newspaper’s public editor, the equivalent of James T. Campbell’s position at the Chronicle. Unlike Campbell, Lake actually has a column to communicate with readers about perceived problems at his newspaper, and in journalism more broadly. That’s a good idea, one that even the New York Times adopted after years of holding out (the Blair scandal, of course, helped push them to that decision).
Campbell, in contrast, seemingly cannot be bothered to answer emails about his newspaper’s editorial policies, even emails phrased in a polite and sympathetic manner. Nor does he have a regular column. Apparently, his function is to transmit complaints to the editorial board. One wonders if the Chronicle wouldn’t be better served if their reader representative had a higher profile and greater authority to scrutinize editorial practices.
A tip of the hat to Rob Booth for catching this reference to Campbell in an unexpected place.
