"The media is making things up." "They’re changing the facts to promote their views." "They are trying to give the Democrats more favorable coverage." "No, the Republicans." "They are taking orders from the government." "No, from the advertisers." "No, from the secret lizard people."
Those are a few of the complaints we get on a regular basis (yes, even the lizard people one, although not as frequently as the rest). Most of the time it’s just a short email. Sometimes it’s a long, angry phone call. Every now and then it’s a direct threat of violence against us and our families.
We are the employees of 9NEWS, and we have a confession.
We DO have an agenda: to provide the most accurate information we can, as quickly as possible, on as many platforms as are available.
That’s it. Those three things, in that order.
We want you to be able to find our reporting wherever it is convenient for you. We want you to be able to find it fast because the world doesn’t wait for us to go on-air at 10 p.m. But before any of that, before we send a Tweet, or a text alert, or go on air with that blaring BREAKING NEWS animation, we want to get it right.
None of the rest matters if we don’t do that first.
But over the last few years, we’ve come to realize something else: none of that, not even the work we do to verify everything, matters if you don’t believe that we do it. We can spend a month fact-checking and getting additional sources, but if you are convinced that the news media is a broken operation, we get nowhere.
So how do we proceed?
The first step is the same as it’s always been: We will do everything in our power to be as accurate as possible. It starts there; it always has, and it always will, but there are further steps that we can all take.
We can be more transparent. How did we find this story? Who did we get our information from? What process do our crews go through to put their report together?
Those questions are why this program exists. We want to show you what we do and how we operate. We want you to understand our methods and how deeply we care about getting it right. We want you to know who we are, why we do this job, and what brought us to 9NEWS.
We want to be as transparent as possible, to show you every step and explain every choice that brought us here, but 30 minutes isn’t nearly long enough. That’s why this isn’t the end of the process. In this article, you will find the full interviews, unedited, of every person featured in the program. While each person was filmed with multiple cameras, the interviews included here will only use one, so there is no opportunity to make edits.
Additionally, we are planning a series of follow-up pieces, that will be posted online and on social media, that will continue this conversation and address some of the topics that there wasn’t time for in the original program. We will speak to the station managers and members of our parent company to address how local stations operate as part of a larger news organization. We will talk directly about how the sales staff relays information to the news department, and what safeguards exist to prevent that from improperly impacting our reporting.
Finally, we want to hear what issues are important to you. What questions do you have about local news? What concerns do you have about how we operate? Let us know so we can incorporate them into future segments.
So much of the complaints we receive come from a lack of understanding of our operations. We hope that this program helps answer some of the questions you might have and helps you to trust our system a little more.
Even with all the steps we take, we are going to make mistakes, we’re still human after all, but please understand that those mistakes come from genuine human error, not an attempt to slant a story or create a bias. When you see a legitimate error or omission, we welcome you to tell us. But if you’re simply angry at what we are saying, we ask that you pause a moment, check other sources to see if others are saying the same thing, and consider how your own views are impacting your reaction.
The point of this program is to be transparent. In the spirit of that, you should know who was behind it. My name is Geoff Sawtell, and I am the Senior Visual Producer at 9NEWS. I started here as a weekend morning editor in 2006 and was a member of that department until November 2017. In the twelve years I have worked here, I have gone out of my way to avoid being on camera, but I felt (with the help of some conversations with others here) that in the spirit of this program it was important to be a visual part of it. If you have questions or concerns regarding this program, you can reach out to me directly at geoffrey.sawtell@9news.com.
Find all the full interviews featured in "Breaking News" below:
