Milking Mother Jones

Dear Dr. Ink:

Last week I wrote a piece on a city council considering using a private security facility instead of the county jail because it was cheaper. I did some research and found two excellent pieces on the issue published by Mother Jones. I borrowed two paragraphs from two different articles and rewrote them to fit in my new story, which was approximately 24 inches.

In the piece I submitted to my editor, I attributed my source. My editor said I should take it out because many think of the publication as too liberal. I did as I was told, but my conscience has been nagging me ever since. What would you have done in a similar situation?

Wondering.

Answer:

Dr. Ink sees two distinct issues here. One in which the editor is very wrong. Another in which the editor may be right.

If the editor has encouraged this reporter to keep the re-written paragraphs in the story and take out only the attribution to Mother Jones, then the reporter has been seriously misled. It’s the reporter’s name on the story, after all, and an accusation of improper borrowing will hurt the credibility of the publication and the reporter.

As Tom Brokaw once told Michael Gartner, former president of NBC News: “It may be your egg, but it’s my face.”

Now if the editor has encouraged the reporter to delete the paragraphs, that’s another story.

When you quote from Mother Jones, you are quoting from a partisan source. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that. But most readers will be unfamiliar with this lefty mag. That gives the reporter four clear choices:

1. Identify the ideological position of the magazine so readers can take that spin into account as they confront the evidence.


2. Seek out a counterbalancing reference from a conservative magazine named Father Smith (Doc just made that up). The great semanticist, S.I. Hayakawa, would call this technique “slanting both ways at once.” He writes: “The writer striving for impartiality will … take care to slant both for and against his subject, trying as conscientiously as he can to keep the balance even.”


3. Present the evidence from Mother Jones to local sources and get them to argue for or against it.


4. Take it out. Especially on deadline, this will become the default position.

[ Do you agree with Doc? Would you use material from Mother Jones without a counterweight? ]