Staff Editorial: False report fails readers

On Tuesday, multiple news sources, including MSNBC and ABC, falsely reported that Duquesne would be cutting tuition for all students by 50 percent. (See story page 3).

We can't be sure, but here is what likely happened: Wall-Street Journal Smart Money reporter AnnaMaria Andriotis reported on Feb. 10 that six private U.S. colleges are cutting tuition. The article reports that, while some of those colleges are slashing tuition for all undergraduate students, other colleges, including Duquesne, are reducing tuition for certain students.

The article very clearly reports in an italicized subheading under "Duquesne University" that tuition and fees will be cut by "50% in the form of a grant for freshmen who enroll in its School of Education." This initial story is accurate, well-reported and concise.

Yahoo Finance reposted this article on its website the same day. Between then and Tuesday's NBC/MSNBC and ABC reports, several national and local journalists failed to do their jobs, and reported that Duquesne was cutting tuition for all students by 50 percent.

Obviously, at least one of these journalists misread the Journal's or Yahoo's report, and then multiple reporters, including those at NBC 10 Philadelphia, WBAL Baltimore and KPRC Houston, lifted the false information from one another, apparently without bothering to confirm it.

Duquesne journalism students are immediately taught the most important journalistic rules. Some Journalism/Media Arts professors have even become notorious for failing students for breaking any of them. These unbreakable rules include: never spell a name incorrectly; never change the wording of a quote; and never rely on another news source's reporting — always go straight to the source yourself.

Lifting information from another news story is equivalent in journalism to blatantly plagiarizing in a scholarly article or knowingly including false figures in a scientific report. Doing so violates the field's most basic code of ethics and misguides readers, who likely assume that information they read on the websites of reputable national news sources like MSNBC and ABC is always accurate.

We know that the internet and competition among news outlets in the struggling industry have led even nationally trusted reporters to feel pressured into making unethical choices, as they did with this story.

But even with these pressures, there is no excuse for any reporter to pervert journalism's ultimate purpose: to inform as accurately, objectively and fully as possible.