The UNC women’s soccer team won its 18th ACC Championship in the last 19 years this past Sunday when it defeated Florida State in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., an impressive feat to say the least. What’s less impressive is how you read about it in Monday’s newspaper.
For whatever reason, the N.C. State football game on Saturday took all of the sports reporters or maybe because women’s soccer success is becoming all to common place, no one from the Daily Tar Heel was on hand to cover the tournament over the weekend.
In reading Monday’s front-page article (“Soccer takes 18th ACC Title,” Nov. 12) however, there was no way to know that no one from the DTH was there to watch it all go down. The article used phone interviews with a player and coach from hours after the game and presented them as post-game interviews taken on-site in Florida. It also reported on the descriptions of the game without giving proper credit to where these facts came from.
The end result was an article that lead readers to think the author was in Florida when in reality she was in Chapel Hill. The quotes from Carolina Coach Anson Dorrance and tournament MVP Nikki Washington needed to be prefaced with, “In a phone interview after the game,” or something else that would accurately depict the manner in which they were taken.
Since Samantha Newman, an assistant sports editor and author of the article, didn’t attend the game or watch it on TV, she also had to rely on someone else’s descriptions for her play-by-play account from the game. Newman either needed to cite Washington and the phone interview as the source for the description of the game, or she needed to credit wherever else she pulled her facts from, because the one thing that is for certain is she did not see the game herself; whoever provided her with a description deserves credit for it.
The intent behind the way the article was written was good. A sports reporter wants the reader of her article to understand what happened in the game, just as if they were there. The problem was that in doing so in this article, readers were mislead to think that she was at the ACC Tournament in Florida when in fact she was not, and proper credit was not given for her play-by-play description from the game.
Even though an assistant sports editor writing the article should know better than to have un-cited play-by-play descriptions of a game she did not see and to report as if she was somewhere she wasn’t, Sports Editor Jesse Bumgartner should have caught these problems in the article long before it ever was published. When he assigned this story out, it should have been made clear that since no DTH reporter was at the game, do not report like one was, and all play-by-play descriptions needed to be credited elsewhere. Even after the article was written these descriptions should have served as a red flag. Before this story ever left Bumgartner’s desk, it should have been fixed.
Not attributing facts correctly is part of a larger issue in journalism. Just like in the academic world we are all so used to at UNC, authors and reporters deserve credit for the work they have done and what they have written. So as reporters and editors continue producing the paper each day, they need to make sure that they are doing it correctly, giving credit where credit is due by citing facts they got elsewhere, and by not misleading readers to think news was covered on-site when in fact it was not.
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