National Public Radio has seen its share of personnel challenges in the last year or so. Its most recent involves the voice that introduces its World of Opera program, Lisa Simeone, a freelance contributor who has also been one of the representatives in media for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

NPR has faced calls in recent days to deal with her involvement. Even though she is not a journalist, the public concerns suggest NPR's reputation for impartiality is affected by her OWS work. Simeone had stepped aside from another role in recent days.

On Friday NPR settled the matter by deciding not to distribute the program any longer. Radio station WDAV in North Carolina, the originating station of the broadcast, now will handle the distribution directly.

Each news organization has a boundary on what it considers too graphic to present to its audience. At times that boundary shifts to more generous depiction when there is a stronger public interest at play.

In the last day many news outlets found themselves judging their own boundaries in determining if they should carry smartphone-taken video of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's dead body being dragged in the streets outside Sirte.

The Hollywood Reporter summarizes the media coverage and decision-making

Newly arrived Reuters media writer Jack Shafer, recently of Slate, has written about the perils of plagiarism and the zero-tolerance policy that ought to accompany transgressions in a newsroom's midst.

Shafer says the real victims are not the creators from whom words are lifted, but the audience that must be denied original work. He wrote in the context of the firing by Politico of a reporter whose work appeared to plagiarize on seven counts.

He writes aggressively about the lack of mitigating circumstances available to the plagiarist seeking a second chance.

"It doesn’t matter if you pinched copy because you were tired, you were harried, your spouse or child was sick or dying, you were under deadline pressure, you jumbled up your notes, you took boilerplate or wire copy that nobody should really claim “authorship” over,  you have a substance problem, you committed a cut-and-paste error, you were blinded by the warp speed of the Internet, you were a victim of the win the morning culture, you are young and inexperienced, you had two windows open at the same time and confused them," he writes.

"These aren’t excuses. These are confessions. And they mitigate nothing."

About 50 journalists and educators have written The New York Times to ask that it more clearly note the conflicts of interest for its opinion-editorial contributors.
 
Their letter to the public editor does not suggest that the Times is alone in the matter, but that as the "paper of record" it can lead the way in identifying the conflicts its contributors have as they write for the organization.

In this instance they have identified Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, as an example of insufficient disclosure. Rather than note that his institute receives funds from the energy sector, the Times refers to him as a senior fellow or an energy expert.

The Times does ask its freelance contributors to answer a questionnaire on their backgrounds

Craig Silverman, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, suggested that the group behind the letter has its own possible conflicts to declare. Nevertheless, he believes that there are reasonable limits on the amount of declarations practical in media and that it is not always possible to explain every detail of one's background. Still, he does call for some standardized approach.

"We should move to standardize the way contributors are asked to disclose potential conflicts of interest and relevant related information," he wrote. "Once that information is provided, we should meet a higher standard of disclosing it to the public."

The first public editor of the New York Times was appointed by Bill Keller, until recently the executive editor, and in his new role as columnist Keller is getting a little expansive about the role and impact of the newsroom watchdog.

Keller says he hasn't always agreed with the newspaper's public editor but has come to accept that person's role as important in the operation. He likens it to proctology and notes even that can be beneficial. That being said, his enthusiasm for the role has diminished over the years, even though he recognizes the "good faith" intentions of that person.

Keller was interviewed at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum on the standards of journalism. He said the newsroom has its liberal bias on several social issues but maintains the equivalent of a legal discipline in its work.

An ancient debate has resurfaced in recent weeks on whether journalists should be accredited by government. The debate has revived concerns in the craft that the negative consequences could outweigh any privileges of professional registration.

The Quebec government's recent review of media led to a proposal of a new regulatory system that would include a registration system of its journalists. Not surprisingly, the Canadian Association of Journalists has called this an excessive interference in press freedoms.

And in England, the shadow culture secretary for the Labour Party suggested not only a registration system but an ability to "strike off" the bad players, much in the way doctors are for malpractice. Not surprisingly, the idea has its critics, including the Guardian's venerable media writer Roy Greenslade.

Online public comments came in for quite the criticism at the annual National Conference of Editorial Writers, the North American body for editorial-page leaders.

The journalists said that oversight of those comments shouldn't have been surrendered, that the comments-for-traffic trade has been a mistake, and that the standards of news organizations have been hurt by the arrival of comments.

While a panel discussion indicated that there is too much value in these comments to eliminate them, there was agreement that vigilant oversight is needed.

A new report from the Pew Center for People and the Press suggests significant problems in public trust of the press in the United States. On nine of 12 negative indices studied since 1985, the survey of trust showed all-time marks.

That being said, the press remains more trusted as a source of information than are such other institutions as government and business.

The report found people trust their local sources of information more than they do national sources, and it suggested that the national perceptions were skewed by negative views about all-news cable television.

"Fully 66% say news stories often are inaccurate, 77% think that news organizations tend to favor one side, and 80% say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations," Pew said in summarizing the study. "As recently as four years ago, 39% said news organizations mostly get the facts straight and 53% said stories are often inaccurate."

Then again, when asked about their own news sources, Americans were far more kind. Some 62 per cent said their sources were accurate and only 30 per cent said the stories were often inaccurate.

Among the other findings in the poll of 1,501 Americans in July: television remains the prime information source; nearly one-quarter now get news from social media; people want their press to be non-political; most believe news organizations have professional intentions; equal numbers say the press helps and hurts democracy; and most support its watchdog role.

Hardly surprising but worth chronicling: A new United Kingdom study has found a decline in public trust of the broadsheet and tabloid press.

With the extent of the phone-hacking scandal much more evident, the poll suggested that only five per cent of Britons trust the tabloid journalists, while 41 per cent trust the broadsheet journalists. That level is down from seven per cent and 54 per cent, respectively, last November.

The YouGov survey for the University of Nottingham found that trust in British members of Parliament rose in the same period to 24 per cent from 17 per cent.

The Columbia Journalism Review has written this week about a possible conflict for the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times. Ethan Bronner is part of a speakers' bureau for Lone Star Communications, a public relations firm that also pitches him stories.

CJR suggests in the piece that Bronner has written about some of the firm's clients as part of his work. It argues that there is an appearance of a conflict in this case. His employer argues his work and speeches comply with its ethics guidelines, but CJR raises questions about this.

"Running the Jerusalem bureau for The New York Times is a tough job in a hypersensitive area, one that attracts more than its share of slings and arrows. So maybe it is best not to hand out extra arrows, as Ethan Bronner seems to have done," the CJR's Max Blumenthal writes.