REPORTING ON THE NEWS

The same day that Newsweek retracted its "flushed Koran" story, becoming the latest poster child for flawed reporting, seven journalists accepted 2005 Mongerson awards for reporting on news coverage that went awry.

Mongerson Prize winner Michael Massing, who wrote about press coverage of the war in Iraq for the New York Review of Books, told a lunchtime audience at the National Press Club, "It's really hard to write about your colleagues." Massing got angry letters for months until the New York Times admitted mistakes and took the pressure off. "This kind of reporting has positive effects," Massing said.

Dallas Morning News reporter Pete Slover agreed. Slover won an award of distinction for reporting on the flawed CBS story about George Bush's national guard service. "There is a sense that 'there but for the grace of God go I.' These sins happen when people are tired, when they rush for the gate." His advice: "Slow down. If you get beat, it's better than what happened here."

Stephen Jimenez, Glenn Sliber and Elizabeth Vargas won an award of distinction for an ABC News 20/20 program that revisited the Matthew Shepard murder, showing that it was drug-related and not a hate crime. For Jimenez, the lesson is never to believe that a story is over. He spent five years reporting the story, gaining access to documents that had been sealed and witnesses who were gagged until a year after the trial ended--information that put the crime in an entirely different light.

Massing said he worries that news organizations are becoming paralyzed by the constant flack they take about inaccuracies, and are no longer pushing to hold people in power accountable. "We have to fight that [paralysis]," he said, "even while cleaning house."

Jonathan Landay and Tish Wells of Knight Ridder also won an award of distinction for uncovering flaws in pre-war reporting. Their editor, Warren Strobel, admitted he argued against doing the story, in part because he was squeamish about the topic and in part because he felt the newspaper's limited resources might be better deployed elsewhere. "I worry about the administration and people in power using our admission of our mistakes to bash us," he said. What's needed, he said, are internal controls to help news organizations avoid mistakes, not controls imposed from the outside.

The Mongerson prize is awarded annually to journalists--print and broadcast--who uncover and correct incomplete, inaccurate or misleading news stories. In the four years the prize has been awarded, more than 200 stories have been entered. The most common errors corrected are incomplete reporting, poor news judgment, bad sources or sourcing, plagiarism or falsehoods, and errors in math or methodology.