There are days when I am embarrassed to say that I am a member of the news media, and Wednesday was one of them. While checking my Google alerts for news that might be of interest to foodservice operators, I came across an article in an online newspaper called The Dallas Blog.
The article was titled “Burger King Serves Unhealthy Lunches to Poor Schoolchildren,” but it dealt with the contracts that Chartwells and Thompson Hospitality have with the Chicago and Washington, D.C., school systems. The writer was taking these companies, subsidiaries of multi-national food management firm Compass Group, to task for serving unhealthy meals, permitting lax food safety practices and generally getting rich off large urban school districts.
So, what was the Burger King angle? In his second paragraph, the writer, Tom McGregor, stated that Compass Group owns Burger King, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. Now, Compass Group has built its empire over the years largely through acquisitions of smaller contract companies, but I wasn’t aware that the British giant had begun gobbling up fast food chains.
It took me about two minutes to verify—on the Internet—that, in fact, Compass Group owned none of these companies. Pizza Hut and Taco Bell are still owned by Yum! Brands, and Burger King is controlled by TPG Capital. Further investigation revealed that the blogger was merely rehashing a story that had appeared in The Washington Times, a “legitimate” newspaper. I accessed that story and saw a piece that itself was built mostly on what other people had reported over the years. The reporter, Jeffrey Anderson, stated that officials from Compass and its subsidiaries, as well as administrators from D.C. public schools, declined to comment.
When I was a newspaper reporter, my editors would have refused to run this kind of a story unless I could a) prove that I had made every effort to get comments from the subjects in question, and b) prove that the facts contained in the article were true to the best of my knowledge.
Now, when I read an article that contains an easily verifiable error, I begin to question what else in the story also is inaccurate. Such was the case with this Times article.
I communicated online with the author of the Dallas Blog piece, whose defense of the article was “The Washington Times insists that Burger King is linked to school meals.” In his article, the Times reporter never even made that leap. He simply stated that Compass Group owns BK, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
I find it ironic that the articles slamming Compass Group and its subsidiaries and, by extension, the Chicago and D.C. school administrators, for allegedly shoddy business and food safety practices and playing fast and loose with students’ health, were themselves built so shoddily and played so fast and loose with the facts. Worse, the damage is done. No correction, retraction or clarification will have the impact of the original articles.
The Internet Age continues to amaze me. News gets disseminated faster than ever before, and an appalling percentage of it gets out there without being edited or fact-checked. What’s worse, few people—be they bloggers or simply average folks on Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media sites—have any qualms about taking such articles at face value and reporting them as gospel. It’s embarrassing for professional journalists to know that anyone with 10 fingers and a laptop can create a “news” site and be taken seriously. The idea that people’s lives, livelihoods and reputations may hang in the balance is rarely considered by these pundits.
In presentations I do on social media, I often mention what a blessing and curse the Internet has been. On the plus side, I can do research so much faster than I ever could using the library and the telephone. But the need for speed has resulted in the precipitous decline of responsible journalism. I don’t think even in the age of William Randolph Hearst and “yellow journalism” was as much misinformation placed in the public’s hands as we see today.
This is not a defense of Compass and its dealings in Chicago or D.C.; I have no opinion because I’ve done no research. But no company or institution ever deserves to be misrepresented by the media. Journalists have an obligation to present facts and evidence and let that information speak for itself. When any of the facts are wrong, however innocent the error, all of the evidence becomes suspect and the case for change gets tossed out.