"Verify, verify, verify"

We're in a hurry and it shows. The rush to get the news to us right now routinely comes at the price of getting it right. And, if you don't get it right, you're not just doing your jobs badly., You're hurting people, real people who read and hear and see what you've done and believe you.
I asked Liane Hansen, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday for two decades and local gal made good, about her thoughts regarding the often adversarial relationship between bloggers and the professional journalists. Hansen observed that there was "a tendency to knee-jerk." She was insistent the need for accuracy even in the climate of instantaneous communications. "We don't have the tenacity to follow through," she said.
As troubling as the Twittersphere and bloggers might be in their impulses to regard first impressions as facts, the cable networks are more problematic. On cable, unedited video and audio can show up, devoid of context and often unconfirmed, and run repeatedly until it's overtaken by another of its kind.
Hansen then told of being on the other side of the desk when her husband, Neal Conan, was taken hostage in Iraq during the first Gulf war. (Conan writes of his experience in a book that's primarily about baseball, Play by Play: Baseball, Radio, and Life in the Last Chance League.) Hansen was getting incomplete and incorrect media reports about her husband's status. It was only after the Red Cross contacted her that she knew that Conan had been released and was safe.
That comes back to a central them for Hansen, that we're dealing with people. "You're not interviewing a book," she was told early on in her career. "You're interviewing a person."
And so, a shy Joyce Carol Oates could say after an interview, "You know, that wasn't like a dentist appointment."
Interviews are best done in person. When a politician or businessman might be reciting what was basically a press release, she could ask, "Where'd you get that tie?" as a way of getting the person off-balance. The purpose of getting them off-balance is not to play gotcha, but to get the other person to talk like a human being.
Hansen was speaking at a breakfast gathering at Amherst College, sponsored by WFCR. She grew up in Worcester and graduated from Marian High School. A few of the locals drew out anecdotes about her life in and around the city. In 1972, she worked on Gene McCarthy's second campaign and, year later, interviewed him for her show.
She's hosted all of the NPR shows except for Car Talk. (She called herself "The NPR Slut"). She's probably the only other one who could handle the Car Talk accent. She noted that she has the accent pretty well tamed in most situation until she hears herself speak the phrase "Former head of FEMA," only to have it come out as "Forma head of Feemer."
I had a brief chat with Fred Bever, news director at WFCR, about the challenges of providing high quality local news with very limited resources. Good reporting takes smart people with enough time and determination to do the proper research, reflection, and writing.
As I was leaving, I had a few moments to speak with Ms. Hansen. I handed her a copy of the Liane Hansen page on the NPR site. I got out my red pen and circled the place where the bio referred to Footlights Theater, instead of Foothills.