Leadership 2: Be impeccable with your word
Our words plant seeds in people's minds that can do great good or cause great harm
You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.
This is the second of a series about leadership. This skill is difficult to teach. Some of it relies on talent. Leaders aren’t necessarily extroverts. Parents, teachers, bosses all are put into positions of leadership. What can help you become a better leader? Let’s explore.
In my previous post, I talked about a book that helped me become a more effective leader. It was recommended years ago by my executive coach, Alan Dobzinski.
“The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom” by Don Miguel Ruiz, is about managing relationships. But it has relevance to those managing a business or a newsroom. Ruiz talks about guiding principles in quasi-religious terms — he calls these principles “agreements”. The first of these agreements is “Be impeccable with your word.”
The word is your power to create or destroy, says Ruiz. This hit home for me as a journalist. We journalists do have power. We get our power from the words we use in print, broadcast, and digital media.
If we apply Ruiz’s principle to journalism, “being impeccable with your word” should mean having the highest ethical standards of accuracy and fairness.
Sensationalism and gossip
The power of the word to destroy and demean has grown massively in these days of instantaneous global communication. In the early days of the telegraph, Mark Twain supposedly said, “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”
In other words, sensational news travels fast. Good news takes the scenic route.
Gossip travels in the fast lane. It’s juicy, sometimes funny, and often scandalous. It makes us feel superior to others. When we engage in it, we attempt to make our own behavior and opinions and ideas appear right and make others appear wrong, stupid, or immoral, Ruiz says.
Given the strong financial incentives for attention-grabbing headlines — driven by powerful algorithms in search and social media — media businesses spread gossip and sensationalism globally and instantaneously. Sensationalism sells.
There is even a risk that well-meaning news organizations inadvertently perpetuate and spread misinformation when they attempt to disprove a lie or gossip.
Less trust in journalism
All of this may explain why trust in news media has continued to decline in the 46 markets on six continents studied in the Reuters Institute’s 2023 Digital Media Report.
“On average, four in 10 of our total sample (40%) say they trust most news most of the time.” Think about that: only four in 10 trust the news. In the U.S. the figure is even lower, just over three in 10, which the investigators attribute to political polarization.
Dictators and autocrats have always used journalistic media to create fear and generate hatred.
Ruiz’s commentary is relevant here: “The human mind is like a fertile ground where seeds are constantly being planted. The seeds are ideas, opinions, and concepts. You plant a seed, a thought, and it grows. The word is like a seed. Too often it is fertile for the seeds of fear” (p. 23, digital edition).
What to do
On the positive side, a shortage of trustworthy, reliable news sources creates an economic opportunity. News organizations with trustworthy news generate value that people will pay for. (See: How publisher credibility creates economic value, with steps toward transparency in news sources, finances, ownership).
A new Reuters study uses years of research to come up with “Strategies for Building Trust in News”. The four main elements build on a greater connection with the audience’s desires for diversity, transparency, and engagement, as shown in the graphic below.
Also, the global movement to counteract misinformation has begun at the grass-roots level, with fact checking services in dozens of countries. (I’ve detailed many of these efforts recently in a survey of fact-checking organizations.)
Agreements Nos. 3 and 4
Getting back to Ruiz and his four principles or “agreements”, Nos. 3 and 4 are “don’t make assumptions” and “always do your best.”
The way to keep yourself from making assumptions, Ruiz says, is to ask questions. This is something we as journalists should be good at.
If you don’t understand something, he says, it is better to ask and be clear. “Without making assumptions, your word becomes impeccable. You will communicate freely and clearly without emotional poison.”
We all make assumptions about a person’s appearance when we meet them for the first time. It’s a survival mechanism. And for journalists working under deadline pressure, making a quick assessment of someone’s credibility is an essential skill. But we should know ourselves well enough to recognize we could be wrong.
I once dismissed someone as not worth taking seriously based on his poor grammar and rural accent when he appeared at a public hearing. I later learned this man was an effective behind-the-scenes community leader. I should have developed him as a source.
Always do your best
This fourth principle seems particularly relevant today, when journalists are under pressure to produce content on multiple platforms. They also must respond quickly to competitors and trolls who are producing misinformation 24/7.
Trying to be perfect and trying to be 100% can lead, paradoxically, to the mistakes caused by fatigue and burnout. As Ruiz says, keep in mind that your best is not going to be the same from one moment to the next. Especially in media, situations are constantly changing.
We see more being written lately about journalists leaving the profession because of burnout. They complain of work taking over their lives (more on the topic from Poynter and the American Press Institute).
When you do your best, Ruiz says, you learn to accept yourself. It means you learn from your mistakes. Learning from your mistakes means you look honestly at your results and your practices.
The best baseball players seem to be good at this. They understand that even in their best years, they will fail to get a hit seven out of 10 times (so a .300 average is considered very good). For them, tomorrow offers another day of opportunity to do better.
Excellent article, Jim. Thanks for sharing it.