The ombudsman for PBS, Michael Getler, has stepped into the controversy over a posting on PBS Mediashift by NYU journalism student Alana Taylor.

In her post, Taylor talked about what she saw as the shortcomings at NYU over its approach to new media. The column provoked a stir at NYU and among journalistic circles online.

It was followed up by a piece by Mediashift editor Mark Glaser on the controversy.

The whole incident was clearly troubling for NYU’s journalism school.  The issue was raised with the ombudsman by Adam Penenberg, an assistant professor at NYU and chairman of the journalism department’s ethics committee.

One of the complaint is that Taylor did not tell her professor or students that she would be writing for PBS Mediashift.  In his complaint, Penenberg cites PBS’s own editorial standards and policies on deception: “The credibility of content is jeopardized whenever the audience or a source is duped or feels duped.”

He also takes Mediashift to task for not giving the people criticised in Taylor’s post a chance to reply.  In its defense, Mediashift was planning to run a follow-up piece from the student with her professor’s point of view and interviews with faculty.

The problem here is that Taylor’s piece was published under the PBS banner, even though it was not written by a PBS employee. Since it was published on Mediashift, it drew far more attention than they would have if they had appeared on her own blog.

The ombudsman concludes:

But the PBS imprimatur on this online feature takes it out of the realm of what one ordinarily considers individual blogging. This was an assignment for a very large public service, and I do think that in this instance this posting did not meet PBS standards. There is no way that Taylor’s posting would have appeared as a PBS television segment or NPR broadcast without additional comment and reporting, and so PBS needs to look into this and perhaps come up with a more refined set of guidelines that cover these new situations if they are going to lend their logo and PBS.org link to them. NYU probably needs to do the same thing.

I suspect this whole episode be discussed at length in ethics classes at journalism schools. There is no easy answer here.

Taylor has a right to be heard and write about her experience at NYU. And professors should be accountable for what they say in class.

In hindsight, Taylor should have told her professors and fellow students that she was writing for Mediashift. But I agree with Mark Glaser that:

Alana has the right to voice her opinion about what went on in her journalism class and that just the exercise of bringing it up for discussion and conversation is worth it.

(Full disclosure: I am also an ‘embed’ for Mediashift and discussed this with my colleagues at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism before taking it on).

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