February 3, 2005

In Search of Ethics Policies for Syndicated Columnists

Linda Seebach, a columnist at the Rocky Mountain News, (Linda - I want your job someday!) informs me that the National Conference of Editorial Writers has set up a task force to explore ethical issues related to syndicated columnists - specifically how syndicates handle columnists' errors.

The NCEW task force, headed by Jerry Ausband, retired editorial page editor of the Myrtle Beach Sun Times, will contact all of the syndicates to gather information allowing the NCEW to compare how syndicates are set up to deal with error-correction. Among the questions the NCEW will be seeking answers to:

How do you screen columnists and editorial cartoonists?

Do you have an ethics policy?

What policy do you follow if contracted columnists/cartoonists violate standard journalism ethics (regardless of where you have an individual ethics policy)?

Do you have a fact-checking process for columnists? How does it work?

When editorial writers or editors find a factual error in a column or cartoon, what effective means can be used to communicate that error and have a correction made?

Robert Cox at The National Debate had some success last year blog-beating the New York Times into adopting a decent error-correction policy for its columnists, many of whom are syndicated. I wonder if the NYT's policy is effective in getting its columnists' errors noted and corrected in the many other publications that publish them.