Journalists betrayed their readers' trust

As far as I'm concerned, one of the worst assignments in journalism is the "person-on-the-street" interview. Typically, reporters ask people on the street a question about a major news event, and their photographs and quotes are printed in the newspaper. Pretty straight-forward stuff, right?

No such luck.

For starters, most people don't want to be approached on the street. Even though they are in a public space, they don't want their personal space invaded. Often, they think the reporter is trying to sell them something or recruit them into a cult. Others would happily offer their opinions but refuse to give their full names or allow themselves to be photographed. Can there be that many people in the witness protection program?

Others were willing but had little knowledge of current events. Some of them required so much coaching that I sometimes felt as if they were parroting my opinions instead of stating their own.

These interviews often required 10 times more energy than a routine news story and frequently did not add much to the public understanding of issues. As many times as I've done this type of interview, it never got easier because I never knew what I'd come across "on the street." I once attempted to interview a man who looked right through me as I asked him to participate. He was absolutely nonresponsive. A week later, he strolled through the newsroom on a tour. He was introduced to me as a patient at the state hospital.

As much as I hated the "person-on-the-street" assignment, I stuck with it as long as it took. Sometimes it took hours to find six people who were willing to be photographed and had opinions that were more sophisticated than, "Yeah, that's a bummer." It never occurred to me to come back to my editor empty-handed.

Someone at a small North Carolina newspaper has apparently come up with a short cut to the dreaded "person-on-the-street" interview. They allegedly invented quotes that were published on the front page of The Reidsville Review in a feature titled "Two Cents Worth." On several days in May, the news item, a staple of the five-day-a-week paper, featured people who do not live in the small town, nor did they speak the words attributed to them.

The News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., reported that several of the photographs published in The Reidsville Review were identical to photos posted on a college social networking Web site called thefacebook.com.