A Lesson in Journalism

When Carrie Fisher admitted to snorting coke on set, news outlets everywhere used a photo from the wrong movie. Minor transgression, or journalism fail?

It’s a small thing, but an important one.

When the news broke a few days ago that Carrie Fisher had admitted to snorting cocaine on the set of The Empire Strikes Back, I automatically did what I always do – I logged on to Google’s News function.

I surfed more than half a dozen different sites carrying the story, but here’s the thing: even though the former Princess Leia said her youthful indiscretion took place on the set of Empire, not a single website had a photo from that 1980 movie.

The vast majority of them included an image of her – complete with Cinnabon hairdo – from 1977’s Star Wars. Maybe one or two showed her in the iconic metal bikini from 1983’s Return of the Jedi.

Before your think I’m clueless, let me say I do get why editors around the world were united in using the wrong photo.

The story is about cocaine. So you want a photo that emphasizes the idea of a coked-up young Hollywood starlet.

Since Fisher’s hair was pretty normal in Empire, you instead use the one with the strange locks from the first movie in the series. It just makes for a funnier visual.

Despite the fact that Fisher named the exact spot where she took the drugs in question (fittingly, it was the ice-planet Hoth set), editors probably couldn’t resist going for the easy laugh.

And ultimately, what does it matter? In the annals of journalistic sins, isn’t this a minor transgression?

Maybe.

Or maybe it’s just as important for journalists to get the little things right.

As a university journalism instructor, this is the point I try to impress on my students: If a news organization doesn’t even have the professionalism necessary to get the small details correct – like the right picture from the right movie – how can it be trusted to accurately render the big picture?

This was the philosophy espoused by the instructors who taught me the trade.

Back in the day at Ryerson University, I would have received a failing grade if I submitted a story with a name misspelled. You can say that was a harsh punishment, but as a young journalist I got the message: attention to detail matters.

And ultimately, the focus on detail is about something different: it’s about building trust. Readers need to be able to trust you as a reporter.

Some students laugh when I tell them, should they make a minor mistake like spelling a name wrong, that readers will get in touch with them to say, “If you can’t even spell names correctly, why should I trust anything you write?” And yet I have had readers say almost those exact words to me.

For the record, I found roughly a kazillion images of Fisher from The Empire Strikes Back within a few seconds on Google Images.

So there are ways for reporters to get the details right. There’s no excuse for laziness, even when publishing a dumb, run-of-the-mill entertainment brief.