A Summer of Case Studies

Two major stories -- the Casey Anthony trial/verdict and the phone hacking scandal out of the U.K. -- make this seem a target rich summer when it comes to ethical case studies in journalism.

But are they of any real use for those of us who teaching journalism in the U.S.?

I don't think so.

Let's take the phone hacking story first.  It's more of a Brit tabloid thing, this hacking into mobile phone mailboxes.  Yes, we're nearly as celebrity crazed in the U.S. as they are in Great Britain, but the phone hack is a harder to pull off here and also we don't have quite the tabloid environment, despite TMZ and National Enquirer, found across the Atlantic.  Maybe some of the News Corp's U.S. properties such as Fox News or the New York Post will get caught up in the storm, but I doubt it.  Short of that, this makes the phone hacking story an interesting one when teaching a basic or advanced news reporting class, but one hard to connect to the day-to-day activities of most working journalists. 

In fairness, there are aspects to invasion of privacy that may make for good material.  And I suspect I could take the phone hacking and extend it to social media in some way, looking for parallels for the students to grab at and understand, but even that may be a reach.

Extreme cases are fun to discuss in class, but in the end their utility is meager.

Speaking of extreme, we also have the Casey Anthony trial and the verdict and this Sunday her release from jail.  Now this is the kind of case we may can use when discussing how not to go overboard with a story (hear that, Nancy Grace?).  About the only real lesson here, for basic or even advanced students, is to avoid taking a side in a major trial and using sources on air or in a story that perpetuate your point of view.  Also, it raises questions about feeding public anger, which is what cable TV now seems to be all about.

This one has more utility.  Only a little, but more.

The case allows me the prof to talk about covering controversial trials, about how to handle sensitive information, but most of all the Anthony story is a case study in how a media frenzy can begin, can be fueled by TV talking heads, and how it's hard to keep the news proportional while also being comprehensive.  The power of social media, particularly Twitter, fits well here.

All in all, though, the trial/verdict is not a terribly useful case study for reporting classes.  Most reasonable people know the coverage, especially on cable television and most especially on Headline News, went off into journalistic Neverland.  At best, other than some social media aspects, a brief mention in class as a cautionary tale is about all the Anthony case deserves.

Unless of course my students want to be the next Nancy Grace.  Then I'll ask them to leave the room.

Casey Anthony and the News

Just when you thought the nightmare might be over, the fine folks at Pew put out a really useful analysis of news coverage and interest in the trial of She Who Must Not Be Named (except in the title above, thus attracting web traffic and building my brand and all that other social networking crud).  Check the Pew study yourself rather than have me shamelessly lift their content here, Huffpost-like.  But there are a couple of key points I'd like to make note of and then comment on.

• Nearly half of those surveyed said news organizations had been fair in the coverage of She Who Must Not Be Named.  Only 20 percent thought coverage had been unfair.  Thirty-one percent of respondents (apparently dead) had no opinion.  I'd love to see a breakdown of this question by the news network or social media consumed.

• Lots of folks heard/read about you-know-who via social media -- 40 percent said "a lot" and, frankly, that's an awful lot.  I admit it, I heard about the verdict via Twitter and immediately called my wife.

• Actual coverage of the who-know-who trial was high, so high it tied coverage of the national debt.  It may have felt like it was all her trial, all the time, but both stories tied at 17 percent of coverage.  I'm betting the numbers on HLN were, ahem, somewhat different.

• But actual coverage is different than actual interest by real folks.  In this, She Who Must Not Be Named dominated coverage.  Far dominated, at 37 percent compared to 17 percent on the economy.  Nothing like a big trial to take our collective minds off a lousy economic situation.

Casey Anthony -- What (kinda) People Know

Merely by mentioning Casey Anthony's name will earn me additional hits, but I wanted to briefly discuss not the verdict itself, or even the media saturation coverage of the trial, but rather the remarkable interest the public has shown in this case and its response to the final verdict.  Much of that interest was fed by Nancy Grace and Headline News, and with the public response came more and more coverage.

But what's the public response to the verdict?  We don't have traditional poll data to rely on (yet), but on Twitter the results seem all one way.  Here's an excellent analysis of Twitter traffic that found 64 percent of Twitter users disagreed with the verdict, 35 percent were undecided, and only 1 percent sided with Anthony being found not guilty.  Doubt Twitter as a measure of public sentiment?  You shouldn't.  It's been found in some academic research to be a reasonably good barometer of public opinion.  Not as good as a real poll, but good.

While we don't have any real poll data yet, at least that I can find, there is this stupid Huffington Post "informal poll" that found only 50 percent thought Anthony was guilty.  I'm rather surprised by such a SLOP (self-selected opinion poll, also known in the survey business as complete bullshit).  Usually the angry folks dominate such faux polls, but apparently not in this case.  By the way, 28 percent had her guilty of a lesser charge and 17 percent thought she was not guilty.  Some might argue hey, that's over 13,000 votes.  It's gotta be more accurate than a scientific poll with a carefully drawn sample of 1,000 people.  And then you'd be wrong.  Size doesn't matter, at least when it comes to surveys.  If you doubt this, just look up the infamous Literary Digest poll debacle of 1936.  Over a million folks surveyed.  Results -- way off.  Unless, that is, Alf Landon really was elected president in 1936.  And I'm pretty sure he wasn't.

Of course the various networks, including HLN, saw remarkable increases in their TV or online traffic during the trial and with the announcement of the verdict.  Much of the response can best be described as anger (Grace, especially, has added fuel to this fire).  Negative emotions are more powerful than positive ones.  That's why talk radio and the TV talking heads who sell partisan indignation and disgust do so well.  Taking a position, it sells.