Ethics in Journalism

Ron Smith

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444358926
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The reputation of journalists is continually being questioned. Nearly every public opinion poll shows that people have lost respect for journalists and lost faith in the news media. In this fully updated and expanded 6th edition of Ethics in Journalism, author Ron F. Smith provides a highly readable introduction to journalism ethics, and offers solutions for the many ethical dilemmas facing journalists today.

• Utilizes dozens of new case studies, mostly taken from everyday experiences of reporters at both large and smaller newspapers and TV stations
• Explores the practical ethical issues involved in developing sources, coming to terms with objectivity, and bringing compassion to the pressures of journalism
• Considers the impact of blogs and the internet on traditional values of journalism
• Compares journalistic practices across different free societies

Part 1

Principles and Guidelines

1

The Search for Principles

Imagine a city as big as New York suddenly grafted onto North Carolina’s Coastal Plain. Double it. Now imagine that this city has no sewage treatment plants. All the wastes from 15 million inhabitants are simply flushed into open pits and sprayed onto fields.

Turn those humans into hogs, and you don’t have to imagine at all. It’s already here.

A vast city of swine has risen practically overnight in the counties east of Interstate 95. It’s a megalopolis of 7 million animals that live in metal confinement barns and produce two to four times as much waste, per hog, as the average human.

All that manure – about 9.5 million tons a year – is stored in thousands of earthen pits called lagoons, where it is decomposed and sprayed or spread on crop lands.

That’s the beginning of a series of news stories that appeared in The News

Observerin Raleigh, N.C. Having that much manure in your backyard can lead to problems. The paper talked to experts and reported:

• New scientific studies had determined that contaminants from hog lagoons are getting into groundwater. One North Carolina State University report estimated that as many as half of existing lagoons – perhaps hundreds – are leaking badly enough to contaminate groundwater.
• Scientists are discovering that hog farms emit large amounts of ammonia gas, which returns to earth in rain. The ammonia is believed to be contributing to an explosion of algae growth that is choking many of the state’s rivers and estuaries.
• Experts said the odor is absorbed by the fatty tissues in the human body: “That’s why some people say they can smell the odor on their breath long after they left the farm.”
• The odor may be more than a nuisance. A Duke University researcher said that it was affecting residents’ mental health. She found that people living near large hog farms experienced “more tension, more depression, more anger, less vigor, more fatigue and more confusion.

With all the concerns about the environment and health of the residents, you might imagine that government agencies were trying to do something about this dangerous situation. Guess again. According to The News

Observerseries:

You don’t have to look hard to spot the pork industry’s connections in North Carolina politics and government. Just start at the top.

U.S. Sen. Lauch Faircloth, a Republican who leads a congressional subcommittee on the environment, is a wealthy hog farmer.

Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt is the top recipient of political contributions from Wendell H. Murphy, whose Duplin County hog company is the biggest in the nation.

The chairman of the environment committee in the state House, Republican John M. Nichols, is building a large hog operation in Craven County and will raise pigs for Murphy.

The chairman of the Senate committee on environment and agriculture, Democrat Charles W. Albertson of Duplin County, is a friend of Murphy’s, and – judging from contributions – the pork industry’s favorite legislator…

To people with grievances against big pork, the alliances look like a power bloc.

“We have not found a sympathetic ear anywhere, ” said Robert Morgan of Lillington, a former U.S. senator who represents plaintiffs in four lawsuits against large-scale hog farms.

The ethics rules of the North Carolina Legislature do not bar representatives with a personal stake in a bill from pushing it in the Legislature. So it was considered both legal and ethical for one hog producer to be elected to the General Assembly and then to help pass laws worth millions of dollars to his company and his industry.

The “King Hog” series was a major project for The News

Observer. Special projects editor Melanie Sill and reporters Pat Stith and Joby Warrick spent seven months interviewing hundreds of people and searching through mounds of records. Photographers, graphic artists, and editors also worked on the project. The result was a series of stories that provided a detailed portrait of the growth of hog factories and stirred many North Carolinians to reconsider the factories’ impact on the state.¹ The series won a Pulitzer Prize for public service.

In Houston, television station KHOU opened its 10 o’clock program with a report by its Defenders investigative team. Reporter Anna Werner began the segment like this:

ANNA WERNER:	It was a new marriage for Cynthia and C.J. Jackson.
CYNTHIA JACKSON:	We were just two middle-aged people trying to start over and to have fun.
WERNER:	So one June day this choir teacher and her husband packed up her Ford Explorer.
JACKSON:	He says let’s just take a ride.
WERNER:	And they took off for Galveston. But as Jackson drove back north something went horribly wrong.
JACKSON:	As I went to change lanes, I heard a pop.
WERNER:	What she heard was the tread coming off a back tire, a Firestone Radial ATX that came with the car.
JACKSON:	I yelled at my husband, hey baby wake up! The truck is shaking!
WERNER:	Then the car began to roll.
JACKSON:	Next thing I remember waking up in the hospital.
WERNER:	And she was facing bad news. Both of her legs would have to be amputated below the knee. But worst of all, her husband of a year and a half was dead... leaving her with one haunting memory.
WERNER:	So the last time you remember seeing CJ was when he looked up... do you find yourself thinking about that?
JACKSON:	(whispered) Yes...
WERNER:	Now, she does the best she can with a life that’s very different than the one she had planned.

Werner then reported a story about a 14-year-old cheerleader who was riding in a Ford Explorer on her way to a homecoming pep rally. One of the Explorer’s Firestone tires came apart at highway speed. The vehicle flipped three times, killing the girl. Werner told viewers:

Those are just two of many similar cases the Defenders found all over Texas – as many as a dozen over the past few years. And all of them have a familiar combination: a Ford Explorer and a Firestone ATX tire with what’s called tread separation, where the tread literally peels off the tire. When that happens, experts say, with some vehicles it can mean a devastating rollover crash.

Werner’s report lasted for nearly10 minutes. In gathering information for it, Werner not only talked to local accident victims, she had traveled to Washington to talk to a former head of the National Transportation Safety Board. She interviewed an expert on tire construction and a former employee of Firestone Tires who admitted that he had made bad tires. She tracked down similar accidents involving Explorers and Firestone tires in other states.

Werner also contacted Ford and the Bridgestone/Firestone tire company and asked them to give their side of the story. A Ford spokesperson told her that the Explorers were not to blame: It was “driver error” that caused the problems. Firestone would not comment on the air, but sent a letter saying the company stood by the safety of its tires.

Immediately after Werner’s report was broadcast, viewers flooded the station with reports of other accidents involving Explorers with Firestone tires. Werner began to put together a follow-up story. When Firestone officials learned she was doing another report, they fired off a letter to executives at the A.H. Belo Co., the owners of the station. The letter accused Werner of “falsehoods and misrepresentations” in her reports about the tires. “This series has unmistakably delivered the false messages that Radial ATX tires are dangerous, that they threaten the safety of anyone using them, and that they should be removed from every vehicle on which they are installed,” a Firestone vice president wrote in the letter. “Each of these messages is simply untrue.” Furthermore, Firestone charged, KHOU was more concerned with “sensationalism and ratings” than serving its viewers. If the station really wanted to help Houston-area drivers, it would do reports on “proper tire maintenance procedures” and “proper driving methods.”

Although the letter did not mention libel or directly threaten lawsuits, it was clear that Firestone meant business. Other media were slow to pick up the story. It was months before newspapers and networks started writing about the potential problems. A KHOU journalist told The New York Times that he thought the strongly worded letter from Firestone may help explain why other news media stayed away. Nevertheless, the letter did not scare off KHOU. The station broadcast a nine-minute segment by Werner in which she reported more accidents caused by defective tires.

Months after KHOU’s first reports, the National Highway Safety Agency opened an investigation that concluded KHOU was right. Bridgestone/ Firestone began to recall 6.5 million tires. As Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana said, “It took a television station’s publicly embarrassing the agency to get the agency off the dime.” The New York Times editorialized, “Had it not been for a Houston television report on the problem that triggered a spate of complaints to the agency earlier this year, most drivers would still be unaware of their danger.”²

The series won the station and Werner several honors, including a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists and a prestigious Peabody Award.

In Springfield, Ill., Scott Reeder heard parents and teachers ask each other why incompetent teachers were never fired. The answer was always the same: “They can’t fire him – he’s got tenure.” Reeder, however, isn’t an ordinary parent who frets about the quality of his child’s education. Reeder covers state government in Illinois for newspapers in Kankakee, Ottawa, Moline, and Rock Island. He decided to find out how difficult it was for schools to fire bad teachers.

The task was not easy. Illinois does not have particularly good public–record laws that would require government to provide reporters with the information they want. Teacher records were even harder to obtain because they were spread among the state’s 876 school districts, and personnel records were often sealed. But Reeder was undaunted. He had another reporter take over the routine stories he normally would have written. In the next six months, he:

• Filed 1,500 Freedom of Information Act requests demanding that school districts show him their public records. On one occasion, his newspaper company had to file a lawsuit and get a court order before Reeder could see the records.
• Read every arbitration case involving a schoolteacher and a school district.
• Spent countless hours poring through court records and legal documents and tabulating the results.
• Interviewed hundreds of people, including parents, students, teachers, lawyers, and experts in education.
• Conducted one of the largest media document searches in the history of Cook County, which is the home of Chicago.

Reeder had set aside six months to work on this one story. He quickly learned that there was so much to do the investigation became more than a full-time job. “I worked straight through a number of weekends,” Reeder said. “I didn’t take vacation and even found myself inputting data on a laptop computer in a hospital maternity ward as my wife and newborn daughter slept nearby.”

What did his investigation uncover? It is extremely rare for a tenured teacher in Illinois to be fired. Reeder found one small rural district that had spent more than $400,000 in attorney fees to fire one teacher – and the case was still in the courts. One district could not fire an assistant principal who fathered a child by one of the seventh-graders at his school. The courts ordered him to pay child support, but he kept his job.

Reeder also discovered:

• Illinois has about 95,000 tenured teachers, but on average only two are fired each year for incompetence.
• In the past 10 years, 94 percent of the districts had never even attempted to fire a tenured teacher.
• During that time, 84 percent had never given a tenured teacher an unsatisfactory rating on year-end evaluations. “Just about everyone gets an ‘excellent’ or ‘superior’ rating,” one superintendent told him.

Reeder thinks the reason so few bad teachers are detected and fired in Illinois has to do with the clout of the state’s teacher unions. On a statewide level, they are the largest contributors to the political campaigns of Illinois legislators. They have forked over more than $16 million in the past 12 years. On the local level, teachers sometimes elect their bosses. School board elections are often off year, meaning they occur when there are no highly publicized races like those for president or governor. Only a handful of people vote. Observers say the teacher unions get the voters out for those minor elections and elect candidates favorable to teachers. Most districts don’t have the money for big pay raises. So when the unions ask for job security instead of pay, the boards happily agree to rules that make it difficult to identify and remove teachers who are underperforming.³

The above three reports are examples of thoroughly reported, well-told news stories. Nearly everyone would agree that they are first-rate journalism. We would take that a step further and say that they exemplify “ethical journalism.”

They made life better for lots of people. The News

Observer’s King Hog informed citizens about a major development in their state and heightened voters’ awareness of an important societal issue. The journalists showed compassion for people who lacked the political clout to make their concerns known. Editors and managers were willing to expose some of the state’s most powerful businesspeople and politicians.

Undoubtedly, KHOU improved the safety of thousands of motorists. The series challenged the federal government to investigate these cases. KHOU went ahead with the stories even though the station was taking on two major corporations that spend lots of money on television advertising. When Scott Reeder wondered why Illinois public schools just didn’t fire the bad teachers, he started on a course of action resulting in reforms that may improve the quality of public education in Illinois.

These reports illustrate another truth about the ethics of journalism. Unlike most lawyers and many doctors, most journalists do not work for themselves. These journalists worked for managements that displayed courage in shielding the news team from the pressure of powerful people in business and government. They were willing to free reporters to work for months on stories – instead of limiting them to stories that can be quickly reported in order to fill the news hole. The News

Observer, KHOU and Reeder’s Small Newspapers Group gave the journalists the time and support they needed to create quality, ethical journalism.

Journalism and Ethics

To many, “ethical journalism” is an oxymoron in the same category as “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence.” In an Internet discussion group for journalists, a police reporter ridiculed ethical questions as “mental masturbation for people who want to get master’s degrees.” He’s not the only journalist who has a faulty understanding of ethics. Perhaps the most common misconceptions are these:

• Some think of ethics only as a list of rules that spell out what they can and cannot do: Do not accept freebies, do not engage in activities that may create a conflict of interest, do not plagiarize, etc.
• Others fear that if reporters get “too ethical,” they will produce wishy-washy journalism: They will be so concerned about hurting someone’s feelings or doing the wrong thing that they will not pursue the truth aggressively.
• And some write off the whole area as little more than a public relations ploy to make people like reporters. Reporters aren’t supposed to be liked, they say. They’re supposed to report the news.

But ethics is broader than these people recognize. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, most philosophers consider ethics to be th...