Samantha Chaffin
Editor-in-Chief
In my time at Idaho State University, I’ve had the opportunity to learn both in a “real-world” setting here at The Bengal as well as in the classroom. University learning mediums aside, I’ve also had the chance to learn from the mistakes of others at both a personal, local and national level and that is an opportunity that not enough people take advantage of.
While I’m all but certain that most of our parents told us to learn from the mistakes of others, I’m equally sure that we also heard the contradictory statement that you have to make and learn from your own mistakes sometimes. Although that may be true in many cases, we need to work to make the number of cases in which the latter applies far fewer and minimize the range of situations in which it may apply.
By now, anyone who has been paying attention has heard about both the Rolling Stone and Bloomberg Politics’ respective journalistic errors.
For those who haven’t been paying attention, the Rolling Stone published a story detailing an alleged brutal gang rape of a woman at a University of Virginia fraternity party without first verifying facts with other sources, aside from the alleged victim.
After other journalists from other organizations looked into the story and did some basic fact checking, many details of the account were discredited and the Rolling Stone ended up retracting the story and apologizing to readers. In early April, the fraternity that was alleged to be involved announced a lawsuit against the magazine.
Shortly after the Rolling Stone scandal, Bloomberg Politics fell for a fake announcement of Nancy Reagan’s alleged endorsement of Hillary Clinton found on the fake news site NationalReport.net. Bloomberg ran the story, which was almost immediately found to be false and the organization quickly retracted the story and apologized to readers, admitting they had fallen for a hoax.
In both of these instances, basic responsibilities were not fulfilled by the journalists and organizations involved.
As has now been determined, simple fact checking and source verification could have likely prevented both of these journalistic blunders and I, along with what I hope is every journalism student in the country, have been lucky enough to watch these mistakes from afar and learn a very important lesson from others’ mistakes rather than our own.
All too often, students and people as a whole rely far too much on being explicitly told or taught any given lesson. If we continue to perpetuate this practice, mistakes like these, or their equivalents in other fields and professions, cannot be prevented and will only continue.
Rather than relying only on our formal education, we need to also take advantage of the lessons that lay in front of us in our everyday lives.
While the lessons in ethics, protocol and journalism as a whole that I have garnered through my own classroom and practical experiences have been valuable, there are larger-scale lessons like the ones demonstrated over the last two months that have had a great impact simply due to the seriousness and effect these stories had on a national level.
It is one thing to hear, in theory, that you must always conduct fact checks and follow up on sources, but it is another thing entirely to watch what happens when it all goes wrong.
It’s lessons like these that truly complement the college experience of journalism students everywhere, if they only pay attention and take advantage of the lessons before them, with the alternative being to wait for a textbook entry in an ethics course or to, even worse, make similar mistakes themselves.
The same applies for each and every major at this and every university in the nation if students are simply open to lessons and learning experiences from all mediums.
