Should editors take one for the team?

By: Joe Strupp While reporters involved in various ethical breaches have been punished in many cases for their crimes, few editors have been suspended or fired in the past year for transgressions that occurred on their watch. No one, for example, has been reprimanded at USA Today for any oversight in policing Jack Kelley. Some longtime newsroom veterans say those in charge should be taking more of the responsibility, more of the heat.

"The editor is responsible for what goes in the paper ? it's his ass," says Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post. "The honorable thing for the editor to do is to offer to resign. There is no alternative."

Bradlee, who served in the top editor post from 1968 to 1991, cites his experience in the Janet Cooke scandal of 1981, in which Cooke was fired and forced to give back a Pulitzer Prize for a story on a heroin-addicted child that turned out to be fabricated. "I offered to resign the same day," he recalls. "If the editor is given the responsibility, it is his. You take the bitter with the sweet." Bradlee's resignation was not accepted, but it was the principle that counts, he says. "I'm not saying the editor of USA Today should resign, but it is her responsibility," Bradlee adds. "If you want the power ... you've got to take the consequences." (USA Today Editor Karen Jurgensen declined comment.)

Marvin Kalb, who spent 30 years as a top correspondent for CBS and NBC News and is now a senior fellow at The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, echoes Bradlee's view. "We often ignore the fact that individual journalists should be under the authority and control of editors, managers and executive producers," he tells E&P. "I feel very strongly that the editor has been given a free pass."

Geneva Overholser, who served as editor of The Des Moines Register from 1988 to 1995 and has been an ombudsman at the Washington Post, stops short of calling for the resignation of editors in every case of an ethical lapse. But she agreed that top supervisors bear part of the responsibility. "Inevitably, it really is always the editor who is responsible," says Overholser, adding that she had to fire a plagiarist at the Register in the early 1990s but did not leave her post because of it. "I don't think the editor ought to fall every time. But it is important for those in charge to accept responsibility."

Orville Schell, dean of the graduate school of journalism at The University of California, Berkeley, also urges newsroom managers to take blame. But he stresses that in many of today's large newsrooms, often with hundreds of reporters, direct supervision by an executive editor is difficult. "It is pretty easy to blame the boss," he tells E&P. "But an editor does set a tone. When a tone is set to do whatever it takes, people will do whatever it takes."

"Depending on the case, the supervisor or supervisors should also be held responsible," adds Tom Wicker, who covered politics for more than 30 years for The New York Times. He warns that news organizations should have more institutional safeguards. "The main lesson is not who to blame, but that we don't have enough checking systems in place," Wicker says. "A liar or a plagiarist ought to be easier to detect."