When CityView blasted the Register for blatantly lying
Jennifer Miller should be fired.
Miller, The Des Moines Register’s food critic, bubblingly told her readers a couple of weeks ago that she was one of the chosen few who “got to taste six new sauce choices at a special cool-people-only (and me, too) blind tasting” to determine “what kind of a new wing sauce will make it on the Jethro’s menu.”
The sauces, she said, were “delicious.”
In fact, Miller never went to the tasting session. She never tasted any of the sauces. She had no idea if they were delicious or stomach-churning. She lied.
“I need to tell you something,” she told her readers a week later. “I lied.”
She explained: she planned to go on vacation the week before the tasting “and had to work ahead.” So she covered an event before it took place, which is a neat trick that wouldn’t occur to most reporters. Then she got sick and couldn’t actually attend. But the column ran anyway.
That’s strange. And it gets stranger.
The tasting event was on April 27. The column ran on May 5, eight days later. She had plenty of time to kill the column, or rewrite it, but she didn’t. She forgot about it, her boss, Executive Editor Amilie Nash, told Cityview. That’s somewhere between incredible and inconceivable. And her editors read it after April 27, “so they did not have reason to believe it was pre-written” — and that’s a great euphemism — “and hadn’t happened,” Nash said.
That’s true: Editors regularly quiz reporters, but it doesn’t occur to them to say: “You actually were at the game” — or the concert or the meeting or the sauce-testing — “weren’t you?” Some things are taken on faith.
Miller did not respond to emails from Cityview. But initially, at least, she seemed to take the whole matter light-heartedly. After confessing that she lied, she went on to say: “So I haven’t tasted the wing sauces but I know they’re all delicious, because Jethro’s wings just are.”
Then she cavalierly wrote the matter off: “The good news is that I didn’t lie about the fact that each Jethro’s location is serving a different new sauce…and [one] will be put on all the Jethro’s menus.” She never apologized to readers.
The Gannett newspaper division has a code of ethics. Among other things, it says:
“We are committed to seeking and reporting the truth in a truthful way.”
“We will be honest in the way we gather, report and present news.”
“We will act honorably and ethically in dealing with…the public….”
“We will always try to do the right thing.”
Nash, who never ducks questions from Cityview, said “the Register takes its ethics policy seriously and expects employees to abide by it.” She said that what Miller did “is not consistent with our standards.”
Asked if Miller had been disciplined, she said she “can’t discuss discipline since that’s a personnel issue.”
She also said she had scheduled a staff meeting for this week to talk about ethics.
That’s too late for the food writer. She made up a story. She broke the ethics code. She damaged the newspaper’s credibility.
Jennifer Miller should be fired. CV
The above text is from CityView’s “Civic Skinny” column. READ THE FULL “Civic Skinny”
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