By Joann Byrd, Visiting Professional
It almost goes without saying that “respectable” media don’t report rumors. For one thing, rumors can’t be verified and we report what we can confirm. For another, we don’t think we should spread a rumor to those who haven’t heard it yet.
If that feels settled, we give you the complicated case of a rumor about Seattle Mayor Norm Rice, a discussion of ethical decision-making around rumors, some new (to me) inside information about rumors, and a suggestion that follows from all of the above. More precisely:
The Story (Norm Rice and the Seattle papers)
The Ethics (a way to reason through this decision and others)
The News (rumors and how they work, from two sociologists)
The End (a conclusion greatly influenced by the sociological news)
The Story “When someone is spreading a false rumor in order to get attention, it creates a dilemma–should you confront the rumor head-on, even if it means giving the perpetrator the attention he wants? Or should you ignore the rumor, even if it means that some people may wonder if it’s true?”
With a little editing, that dilemma would sound familiar to any journalist who’s struggled with the damned-if-you-do consequences of choosing whether to report a rumor.
But the speaker is Seattle Mayor Norm Rice, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors who was, when he said that, a candidate for Washington State governor.
Rice described the conflict at a press conference May 13, more than two years after a former city employee began what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called a “scattershot campaign of accusation and vitriol against Rice.”
Seattle area media had heard the accusations and checked them out. P-I managing editor Kenneth F. Bunting recalled that “there was little that was credible about the scenario” maintained by Kurt Hettiger, who was fired from the Water Department in late 1993. Said Bunting: “To believe the incident as Hettiger had detailed it, one had to also believe that the police department, the fire department, emergency transport drivers, the hospital and the media had all engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to cover it up.”
Seattle Times executive editor Michael R. Fancher wrote in his first column after the Rice press conference, “Our conclusion was that the rumors were false.”
The rumor was that Rice had been shot by his wife when she discovered him in a sex act with his male deputy mayor.
The story was told in dozens of letters and faxes to Rice and other officials, and in fliers Hettinger distributed in downtown Seattle asking “Who Shot Mayor Norm B. Rice?”
The day Rice announced for governor, a caller brought up the rumor on Mike Siegel’s “Hot Talk” show. Siegel, afternoon host on KVI-AM, said he’d heard the rumor and would look into it further. (He did hire a private investigator, and later said the detective could not substantiate the story.)
Over the next several weeks, conservative talk shows across the state discussed the rumor.
Rice goes proactive Rice said he decided to fight back after Siegel’s April 11 show, simulcast in Spokane. During the show, called “The Truth About Mayor Norman B. Rice,” a former Seattle policeman repeated Hettiger’s claim. Siegel labeled it a “rumor,” and said he’d heard it from “a variety of sources who are very credible.” He called on Rice to publicly deny the allegation.
About that time, Bunting, the P-I’s managing editor, wrote a memo as he prepared to be away for two weeks. He directed that the paper should not report the allegations in the absence of “credible, on-the-record sources with first-hand knowledge of the purported incident itself AND, not or, the supposed cover-up.”‘
A few weeks later, Rice invited the media and others to a press conference the following Monday. That announcement, said Bunting, “changed the story…we had never been close to running a story about the accusations in the fliers…on the other hand, there was never much consideration of NOT doing a story once we learned that the mayor was planning to dramatically confront them.”
The P-I advanced the press conference at the top left corner of the front page May 11, describing the rumor in the eighth paragraph: “Initially, Hettiger contended Constance Rice shot her husband in the wrist after she found him having sexual relations with then-Deputy Mayor…A later version says another member of the mayor’s family shot Rice in the shoulder.”
The report recounted Hettiger’s history with the city and Rice, identified the former deputy mayor and quoted him saying: “It’s so preposterous…But it does hurt people because people believe it.”
In contrast, the next day’s Seattle Times previewed the press conference with eight paragraphs leading a “Political Notebook” on B4. The column characterized the tales as “bizarre rumors about the mayor’s personal life.”
At the press conference, Rice denounced the allegations as “ludicrous, outrageous and untrue,” without mentioning the specifics of the allegations. His wife Constance surprised the gathering by saying she could never have been involved in a shooting, that she hated guns: Her father had been murdered.
Siegel’s listeners heard the press conference live. That afternoon, Siegel apologized to Rice and his family on the air.
The next day, Rice took off on a campaign tour called “Taking the High Road With Rice.”
The Fallout Siegel was fired two weeks later, for damaging the reputation of Fisher Broadcasting Inc., by airing those rumors. But his talk show career continues: he is on 22 stations in Washington State, via the Michael Siegel Network.
Rice was defeated in the Democratic primary Sept. 17 but garnered more votes than the top Republican vote-getter. Reporting a poll conducted in the two days before the primary, the Times interviewed a resident of southwest Washington who said when she considered Rice, “I heard something about a scandal; I don’t know what it was about or how it was resolved, but that made me not want to vote for him.”
Times editor Fancher said after the primary, “there is no way to know whether the rumors hurt him or whether he helped himself by standing up to Siegel…Most of the post-election analysis has focused on other things.” He added that “Rice said he got off to a slow start, and attributed part of that to the distraction of the rumors, but didn’t cite them as a significant factor in his loss.”
The Ethics Despite his apology to the mayor, Siegel continued to defend his actions on a panel at the national convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in California in August. He said of the rumor, “For three years it had been brought to my attention, and I had rejected it because it was a rumor.
“When something happens spontaneously on the air as this did,” Siegel said, “it was handled in the proper manner.”
Siegel’s primary point in Anaheim was, “Talk radio is not journalism, and I don’t think the standards that we should be judged by should be from those traditional standards…We are in effect the town meeting…what we do is to try to get people involved. I like to talk about enlightenment and empowerment and entertainment; entertainment being the key.”
Siegel’s right if the public does believe talk radio is entertainment. That’s a stretch, but talk radio is free to ignore journalism’s rules if talk radio is understood to be entertainment. The trouble arises when talk radio encourages or allows listeners to believe it is following journalism’s standards of verification. That can mislead the public and reflect badly on journalism. (That may be why some of us hate it when a talk show host claims to tell truths that mainstream media don’t).
The reason the Rice rumor resonates beyond journalism, of course, is that passing along claims that are derogatory and suspect violates just about all the ethical principles humans share. You don’t have to be a journalist to want talk radio to screen calls for hateful rumor.
Umm: Back to business As much as we may not like talk radio allowing a rumor to develop legs, what concerns us here is what journalists do with rumor.
The Times’ Fancher had written, “A rumor isn’t a story just because it’s been heard by lots of people. Nor does it become a story just because someone prints it in leaflets or because a radio-talk-show host allows anonymous callers to spread it around without any substantiation whatsoever.”
Good enough. But it’s worth figuring out when a rumor is a story–if only because rumors are doing very well indeed these days, with talk radio and the supermarket tabloids or anonymous, unknown or fictitious authors on the Internet.
So we ask:
When is a rumor “out there” so much that we think we are compelled to cover it?
If we do cover it, how much detail do we report?
The Seattle papers came to the same conclusion on the first question: Neither paper reported the rumor’s existence until Rice called his press conference.
The papers came down on opposite sides of the second question; the Times running a piece inside that referred only to “bizarre rumors about the mayor’s personal life” and the P-I writing a 35-inch story played as the off-lead of the paper.
The P-I’s Bunting says, “We reported the attempted character assassination in a way that gave no credibility to the charges. We identified the source…explained his possible motives and exposed his propensity to make character/blackmail threats to public officials. We reported that none of the accusations had been substantiated, and we debunked claims of those who said they had been…In fact, I believe our approach helped readers understand how ridiculous and how scurrilous the rumors proved to be.”
Bunting adds that the P-I did not publish “the lewd, lascivious and corrupt–but clearly not credible–scenarios portrayed in the fliers and on radio.”
Like most ethical dilemmas, the choice between publishing no details and publishing more details creates a conflict among the principles we are loathe to violate.
Hard choices Consider the Guiding Principles for Journalists corralled by Bob Steele, director of the Poynter Institute’s Ethics Program. They are:
Seek truth and report it as fully as possible;
Act independently, and
Minimize harm.
The Seattle papers had sought truth in the rumor itself, and found none. The new truth was that the rumor was spreading and Rice had called a press conference to denounce it. Reporting those truths as fully as possible would seem to argue for more details about the rumor’s content.
Reporting the truth is intended to keep the public informed. Telling people more allows them to evaluate the specifics, instead of speculating what the specifics might be.
Yet the public may not want journalists to report rumors. In his “Inside the Times” column May 19 Times executive editor Michael Fancher wrote that David Boardman, the paper’s regional-enterprise editor, was influenced by Front Porch Forum, the paper’s dialogue with readers. Boardman told him that readers “want us to put these things in the proper perspective in the political process.”
Another of Steele’s guiding principles would have us Minimize harm. Reporting all we know likely would hurt Rice, his deputy and their families.
Or so it seems: if a reliable medium reports a rumor, it lends the tale legitimacy. A rumor that might actually be true is more damaging to the subject than a tale with no recognition from trustworthy quarters.
(The media’s apparent blessing also rewards those who invent or spread rumors and so, encourages more harm.)
But what became different in May is that Rice consented to this harm. When he called a press conference, he agreed to have the information made public, and understood that the media could (make that, would) report more than he was reporting.
If people give informed consent to some treatment, they don’t get to complain when it happens. We usually think that holding or seeking public office implies consenting to diminished privacy and greater public scrutiny. (Though probably not to being the subject of tawdry rumors: If rumor is the issue, consent would require a specific agreement.)
Minimizing harm is always good. But when we weigh that goal against informing the public in a case where the subject has agreed to the harm, the obvious course seems to be telling the public. But just a minute.
Guard against manipulation Steele’s third principle tells us to act independently. From a distance, that appears to be what’s happening.
But political observers told Michael Paulson of the P-I Capitol Bureau that “the mayor’s action appeared to be intended not only to limit the damage from the rumors but also to be a calculated gamble to garner attention and sympathy for a gubernatorial campaign that could use a boost in the opinion polls.”
Obviously, the more we go along with a political initiative, the less independence we show. If the Rice campaign went public for the sake of sympathy, then the more coverage the rumor got, the more the paper would be helping that cause.
We do not recommend falling for manipulation nor appearing to. And even sophisticated, skeptical, independent journalists can find themselves manipulated by professionals. (Which does not phase a whole lot of readers who think we routinely and intentionally carry water for politicians.)
So if we believed the Rice camp were solely trying to kill the rumor then we should print more, not less. If this seemed to be a self-serving grab for sympathy, the best way to resist the influence and show off independence would be publishing not one syllable more than necessary.
The News When the information we’ve got seems to point in all directions, the answer is often More Reporting.
In wrestling this question, More Reporting meant turning to two sociological texts that shattered some aging assumptions about rumors.
One book was the 1966 classic, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor, written by Tamotsu Shibutani, sociologist at the University of California Santa Barbara. The other was the 1990 book, Rumors: Uses, Interpretations and Images, by Jean-Noel Kapferer of the French Foundation for the Study of Rumors.
Shibutani’s idea was that “Rumor is a substitute for news…it is news that does not develop in institutional channels.” Rumors develop, he claimed, “when there is an unsatisfied need for information.”
This was 1966, remember: “If the news in demand is of the sort not expected in institutional channels, reliance is placed upon rumors. Matters regarded as being in poor taste, such as the sex habits of community leaders, are discussed surreptitiously; it is understood that potentially libelous material cannot be published.”
Shibutani also wrote, “known or suspected censorship increases the incidence of rumors. Institutional channels are then not fully trusted…the public invariably credits the censor with gratuitous stupidity.”
Two dozen years later, French sociologist Kapferer added further enlightenment, starting with the experience that “rumors generally present themselves with all the trappings of ideal verification, e.g., an eye-witness…Rumors always reach us through a friend, colleague or relative who was…a friend of that witness…A first-hand witness has the status of a spontaneous and disinterested reporter…”
Especially germane for journalists is Kapferer’s claim that whether we believe what we hear is subjective, but that “once a rumor is qualified as a ‘rumor’ by the public, it stops spreading.”
“Rumors,” Kapferer writes, “reveal secrets; they are rare and thus highly prized–which is the very basis of their value…” It’s no surprise, then, when he writes some pages later, “In the rumor process, once information is shared among too many people, its value seriously diminishes, and the rumor thus stops short….
“Snowballing is the only way for a rumor to last…identical repetition kills the news value of all information…the permanent addition of new details, systematic inflation of figures…amplification and exaggeration are value-boosting devices.”
(I interpret that to say that reporting a rumor without any specifics provides an incubator for snowballing.)
The End Nobody said ending rumors is our job. The primary reason journalists don’t report rumors is that rumors can’t be verified, and we don’t report what we can’t nail down.
But we often decide not to report a rumor–even with an “unverified” label–because we believe it causes harm without informing readers or viewers in the process. Specifically, we fear that we spread rumors to those who haven’t heard them yet, and provide rumors a seal of authenticity.
When we report a rumor, we do tell people who haven’t heard yet, and we do give rumors institutional attention. But the sociologists suggest that we may actually nurture a rumor when we do not report its existence, with at least some details.
The sociological studies challenge the assumption that our publishing a rumor and its details is automatically harmful. It turns out that we might not feed a rumor by reporting it:
The media are a reliable source, with standards of verification. If we declare some tale a “rumor,” our authoritative characterization may actually kill it.
If we provide the details, it could end the snowballing that Kapferer says will boost a rumor’s value and staying-power. If we announce it to our public, that likely makes it common knowledge and destroys its black-market value.
That doesn’t argue that we should publish rumors. But it does say that there might be times when doing so does not cause the harm we’re worrying about.
Anybody want to devise a guideline?
It would say we will consider reporting a rumor and its details when:
- The rumor is of important public interest (vital to our understanding a public person or a public issue),
- The rumor is sufficiently “out there,” and
- A goodly collection of readers or viewers would be better off to know the truth.
That guideline would favor our Seeking the truth and reporting it as fully as possible, and our Acting independently, (for the benefit of readers and viewers).
And it would acknowledge that we have evidence that publishing rumors with their details may actually cause minimal harm.
