Everyday Ethics

Slate's Jack Shafer starts off his criticism of The Washington Post's recent meth story this way:

How Not To Report About Meth The Washington Post shows the way.

Start your article with an anecdote, preferably one about a user who testifies about how methamphetamine destroyed his life. Toss out some statistics to indicate that meth use is growing, even if the squishy numbers don't prove anything. Avoid statistics that cut against your case. Use and reuse the words "problem" and "epidemic" without defining them. Quote law enforcement officers extensively, whether they know what they're talking about or not. Avoid drug history except to make inflammatory comparisons between meth and other drugs. Gather grave comments from public-health authorities but never talk to critics of the drug war who might add an unwanted layer of complexity to your story.

He goes on to tear apart The Post's Sunday story for the rest of the column. Then he adds a link to a recent Willamette Week's teardown of The Portland Oregonian's 2004 meth project Unnecessary Epidemic, calling the alternative weekly's critique "brilliant."

Yet The Oregonian's five-part series avoids the clichés and predictability that Shafer says plagues The Post's work.

The Oregonian doesn't get into a personal story until Day 5. And even then, they look at the impact of meth on a child of an addict. Before that, the newspaper gathers original data to demonstrate that:

• If the government would regulate the international and local distribution of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the ingredients in over the counter cold medicine, meth would not be the problem it is today.
• The drug lobby has fought such regulation for years. Recently legislation was passed.
• During two time periods in the 1990s, when international authorities managed to restrict the black market supply of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, meth rehab admissions dropped, crimes including forgery and fraud declined in Oregon, reported car thefts fell throughout the Western states and meth-related emergency room admissions went down. 
• Most of the meth in the country is imported by drug cartels from foreign countries, not made in basement labs.
  

Shafer is wrong about the Willamette Week's analysis. It's not brilliant. It criticizes The Oregonian for doing what Shafer suggests The Post should have done: In-depth reporting to a fault.  The WW does make some good points. There is a problem with hyperbolic language in editorials. But when it gets to the meat of its criticism, the WW offers up the results of two studies that contradict the dozens of studies and original database reporting The Oregonian produces. It suggests that The Oregonian has gone too far on a public crusade, skewing the truth and as a result, diverting public funds from health and education into drug rehab. O managing editor Stephen Engelberg offered up a convincing rebuttal.

Shafer criticizes the WaPo for failing to provide hard data. The O provides so much hard data it runs the risk of scaring off readers who are number-averse or afraid of complexity.

He criticizes the Post for sensational headlines. Here are the O’s main headlines: Unnecessary Epidemic, Lobbyists and Loopholes, Token Deterrent, Shelved Solutions and Child of the Epidemic. Hardly the Reefer Madness hysteria Shafer decries.

"What is a seized (meth) lab?" Shafer asks of The Post? See the big graphic on day one of The O's series.

In fact, the Oregonian’s meth series is, by the standards Shafer suggests in his critique of the Post, a solid piece of service journalism. If I were searching for a hyperbole, I might even call it…brilliant.

A disclosure: I like The O. And editor Sandy Rowe was a guest in our recent gathering of Ethics Fellows, where she discussed the meth project. I taught just last weekend at the National Writer's Workshop, hosted by The Oregonian. I did not get paid. I was an intern 18 years ago with lead meth reporter Steve Suo, although we haven’t talked much in years. (And I'm not at all mad that he didn't stop by this weekend and say hello.) If I thought the Willamette Week's critique and Shafer's endorsement of it had any merit, I would say so. Or at the very least, I would just stay quiet.