Is controversy always worth mentioning?

The most recent post from the NPR Ombudsman is a very interesting one.  NPR ran a story about the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts, and failed to mention the controversy surrounding the Boy Scouts and its intolerance to homosexuality on nearly all fronts.  Instead, the NPR piece took a noticeable optimist, almost inspiration angle to the Scouts and, one again, managed to completely underplay the Org's behavior toward gays.

According to the Ombudsman, the NPR story should have mentioned Gays.  I'm incline to agree.  Though I don't think the controversy need be mentioned every time the Scouts are mention in the news, it's clearly important that it be mentioned in a story like the one that ran this weekend, where the article is in tribute of 100 yrs of Boy Scout history.

The problem is a tendency that all journalists have to be just a little bit biased.  As a news writer and new editor on the Tower, I don't only see that tendency in News writers who are afraid of coming down too hard on their interviewees, but I also see it creep up in myself from time to time.  Sometimes, unfortunately, we like the people we're writing stories on, or we like the organization that we're covering.  Sometimes, even though we're reporters, we get caught up in the thrill of, say, the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts or the Beijing Olympics, and forget that it's also our job to tell the other side of the story.

I have a strong feeling that that's probably what happened in the NPR article.  Someone was afraid of saying something offensive, or putting future interviews in jeopardy, and decided to cower away from telling the whole story by ignoring the hard questions. But as a journalist, we really don't have a choice.

The original article can be found here.