School shaming is unfair. Part 3
How bad journalism makes everything worse.
The story so far
I have been looking at school shaming. This is when allegations made about a school on social media, or in traditional media, result in many people publicly denouncing that school.
In Part 1, I talked about how those who question school shaming are attacked online.
In Part 2, I described the unfair nature of school shaming. I also described how common it is for teachers to be the subject of false and unfair accusations.
Bad reporting
In this post, I will begin looking at how bad journalism makes school shaming stories worse for schools. Before I begin, I should acknowledge that reporting on stories involving children is a difficult job. Journalists cannot approach children to interview them the same way they can approach adults. There can be safeguarding issues involved in identifying a child in the reporting. Even a journalist with good instincts about whether an adult source is reliable may have a poor understanding of when and why children lie.1 However, the fact that something is difficult to do, does not justify doing it badly. It would be better if journalists who cannot confirm that a story is true didn’t report it, especially when reporting it will have significant negative consequences for those involved. If responsible journalism means not publishing a story because it cannot be substantiated, then so be it.
Irresponsible journalists make school shaming worse in several ways. Here I will look at two of them.
What journalists should stop doing
1) Reporting uncorroborated complaints
In Part 2, I described how common it is for teachers to face false or unfair accusations from parents and pupils when they enforce school rules. Some journalists are unaware of how common this is and are happy to construct a story out of such claims. As a result, schools can go through a hell of abuse and recrimination based on completely false accusations. Too often, journalists assume that:
Parents and children would have no reason to lie.
If a school does not deny an allegation, they must have something to hide.2
Because it is hard to corroborate a claim about what happened in a school, then there is no need to corroborate it.
I won’t repeat what I said in my previous post about how common false or exaggerated complaints are. However, I would add that schools are not beyond the reach of journalism. Undercover reporting has exposed scandals.3 Schools do have to respond to Freedom of Information requests. Sometimes reliable witnesses can be found. Of course, good investigative journalism is resource-intensive and expensive, but this should not be used as an excuse to report rumours on the internet as if they were news. If a school could sue for libel, how many school shaming stories would be published? I am not suggesting that changing the law, or increasing the use of lawyers to strangle the press, would be a good thing. Nevertheless, I do think it is unethical for journalists to report allegations about schools that they would never dare publish with the names of those accused. If a story is unsubstantiated, journalists should kill it. If they publish it, but remove the identifying details that would make them likely to lose a libel case,4 it does not reflect well on their integrity.
2) Harvesting complaints
When an accusation is made about a school or MAT5, those making it will be contacted by other individuals with a grudge against the school. As well as many parents, those making or publicising allegations may also hear from disgruntled ex-employees. If these sources corroborate the original story, then that is of interest. Too often, though, these additional sources make complaints that have little or nothing to do with any specific incident in the original story. This leads to the phenomenon of “non-corroborative corroboration” where further negative comments about a school or MAT are seen as vindicating the original accusations, even where those comments only support the hostility of the accusers, not the accuracy of their accounts.6
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Facebook group set up to attack a school, or a story in a national newspaper reporting on allegations about a school, the result is the same. One allegation will lead to another, even if both allegations are false. It’s not that the number of accusations is never a relevant consideration. Similar allegations, made independently, can corroborate each other. However, witch-hunts are fun, and it is easy to create an environment in which people are encouraged to make complaints, each less credible than the last. In such circumstances, accusations aren’t being corroborated, they are being harvested. Good journalists pay attention to the quality of their sources, not the quantity. In the age of social media, a large number of people saying an individual or institution is bad does little to establish their guilt. Bad journalists will ask “How can all these people be wrong?” instead of “How did they come to say these things?”.
To be continued.
In part 4, I will look at other ways in which shoddy journalism can undermine schools.
Probably the best recent example of journalists being unduly credulous about a child’s story is not from a school shaming story, but from stories about a Welsh schoolboy who lost a finger climbing a fence. He claimed it happened when he was being chased by racist bullies, and this led to many news stories about racism and bullying. The police eventually concluded that no one else was involved in the incident.
Schools typically don’t respond in detail to allegations. Sometimes this is because a detailed rebuttal is impossible without revealing confidential information. Often, it is because schools have learnt that responding to a hate campaign makes it worse.
Terrible behaviour in schools was exposed in the 00s by Undercover Teacher and Classroom Chaos. More recently, abuse by teachers has been exposed by the BBC’s Panorama programme.
I am choosing my words carefully here. I don’t begrudge the right of journalists to avoid the risk of legal action that is intended to intimidate or silence. However, if a story would not stand up in court at all, it should not be published.
Multi-Academy Trust.
The best example of this is the “flattening the grass” story aimed at a MAT. In the original version of the story, it was claimed that “flattening the grass”:
…involves the MAT executives visiting the school, en-masse, to stand around the edge of the assembly hall whilst the head of school outlines, in emphatic terms to year group after year group, the MAT’s expectations of students’ behaviour.
“Before the assemblies begin, individual students are identified for the head of school to single out in front of their peers until they cry…”
In subsequent coverage of the story, the definition of “flattening the grass” changed to incorporate allegations that did not include the deliberate targeting of pre-selected children. Soon, “flattening the grass” just meant teachers shouting. In the final version of the story, six days after the original story, we were hearing about how “flattening the grass” included the treatment of school leaders.
A second source from the school - who asked not to be identified - said: “I was also witness to a ‘flattening of the grass’ of the SLT [School Leadership Team].”
The source said members of the SLT were subject to “aggressive shouting” and “intimidating body language”. “It was never a one on one, it was a two or three on one minimum,” they said.
The precise details of the original allegation had simply ceased to matter.