Excerpt of Remarks by Gary Gilson of the Minnesota News Council
EXCERPT OF REMARKS BY GARY GILSON,
DIRECTOR OF THE MINNESOTA NEWS COUNCIL
June 30, 2006
At the Media Giraffe Project summit:
“Democracy & Independence: Sharing News & Politics in a Connected World”
At the University of Massachusetts – Amherst
"The Knight Foundation made a grant to the Minnesota News Council and to the Washington State News Council about a year ago for us to conduct a national competition to find applicants who wanted to start their own news councils elsewhere. And in Long Beach at this moment the journalism department at Cal State Long Beach is receiving a $75,000 check to start up a news council and I'm here to present one to the program at the University of Massachusetts, which I'll do in just a moment.
"There are only three news councils in the country at moment -- Minnesota, Washington and Hawaii. Ours is 36 years old. Minnesota has one because the publishers who make up the membership of the Minnesota Newspaper Association, making up 385 newspapers in that state, decided in 1970 to try to reverse the decline in public trust that they detected.
"I was at a trust-building workshop at a newspaper association in a neighboring state a couple of years ago and I was introduced to the emeritus head of the newspaper association and he looked at me and said, "There must be something wrong with the water in Minnesota because those publishers must have been crazy to form a news council. We don't have those ethical issues in our state.” That's the kind of resistance that news councils have met from publishers, reporters and editors around the country who are operating on the basis of no knowledge of how a news council works.
"I just want to say what a news council does. A news council does not have the authority, does not want the authority -- and should not have the authority -- to tell any news organization what to do and what not to do. We exist simply to bring together members of the public and the news media in a public place to have a public conversation about standards of fairness.
"Now in the aftermath of all these ethical lapses in the past couple of years there has been a new spirit of openness in the news media, as reflected, for example, by the hiring of a public editor by the New York Times, just to cite one example. And enlightened news people are embracing the idea of openness.
"I found it very interesting this morning to hear Lee [Rainie] from the Pew Center talk about how their research reveals that one of the things the public wants from the news media is transparency. It is the very kind of transparency that the news media insist upon when they try to hold government or business or anybody else accountable. There has been a traditional resistance to being held accountable from the outside by the news media and that has been self-defeating. So if a news organization is looking to build public trust and has an ombudsman, or publishers letters to the editor that are critical of the newspaper's performance, or columns by the editor or publisher on subjects which make the newspaper feel vulnerable, they why not embrace the idea of yet another form of openness?
"The St. Paul Pioneer Press publishes regularly a small advisory next to the corrections on page 2A and it says, "If we can't resolve your complaint we will participate with you in the process of the Minnesota News Council." How can any reader of the St. Paul Pioneer Press not feel reassured that a complaint is going to be listened to and that they can have an honest discussion about it?
"In all the years that I have observed the Minnesota News Council, which is since 1982 and I was a member of it for six years, I have never once heard a person bring a complaint that said a news organization didn't have a right to do a particular story. The knee-jerk reaction of so many people in the news business has been to any complaint -- you are undermining freedom of the press. We've never seen anybody try to do that. What the complaints are about is invasion of privacy, inaccuracy, bias and sensationalism, among other things. And those are addressable, and news organizations that participate willingly in discussions about ethical standards consistently build trust.
"Now I want to ask Norm Sims, Bill Densmore and Ralph Whitehead, who organized the application to begin a New England News Council, tocome foward. It is a New England News Council that is going to begin its efforts by using the traditions of New England and the town-hall meeting to organize forums and discussions of ethical standards using the Internet as the basis for their expanding work. And I would like them to come forward and I would like to present them with this certificate."
