Journalistic Ethics

Moral Responsibility in the Media

Dale Jacquette

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315508832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Giornalismo

Journalistic Ethics: Moral Responsibility in the Media examines the moral rights and responsibilities of journalists to provide what Dale Jacquette calls "truth telling in the public interest." With 31 case studies from contemporary journalistic practice, the book demonstrates the immediate practical implications of ethics for working journalists as well as for those who read or watch the news. This case-study approach is paired with a theoretical grounding, and issues include freedom of the press, censorship and withholding sensitive information for the greater public good, protection of confidential sources, journalistic respect for privacy, objectivity, perspective and bias, and editorial license and its obligations. This is a book for anyone who now works in journalism, or is considering a career as a journalist. It is also important groundwork for everyone who follows the day's events in newspapers, radio, television, or on the internet.

chapter one

Truth Telling in the Public interest

We have already considered the importance for journalists of truthful reporting. False “information,” as we have suggested, is not really information; hence it is not really news, even if it is offered in the context of a news report. We are not informed about the state of things in the world if someone tells us it is raining when in fact it is not raining. Journalists accordingly do not fulfill their fundamental professional responsibility to discover and communicate information when they do not report the truth.

TRUTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Commitment to truth and accuracy in news reporting is recognized as a fundamental obligation of journalistic ethics. The requirement is emphasized by Tunis Wortman in his now classic 1801 work, A Treatise Concerning Political Enquiry and the Liberty of the Press. Wortman offers one of the earliest efforts to articulate the obligations of media always to tell the truth:

Every departure from truth is pernicious. Impartiality should be a perpetual attribute of the press. Neither fear on the one side, nor the hope of reward on the other, should intimidate or influence its enquiries. It should neither be bribed to lavish unmerited applause, nor menaced into silence. The usefulness of periodical publications depends upon their steady and inflexible adherence to rectitude. The moment that corrupt or foreign considerations are suffered to bias, or to stain their pages, they become injurious to the genuine interests of society.¹

Some commentators on the rights and responsibilities of the news profession similarly contrast the freedom of the press with the requirement to avoid false or inaccurate misinformation. The 1947 Robert M. Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press similarly finds the following important qualification whereby freedom to report the news is carefully distinguished from the wanton license of journalists to say whatever they want regardless of its truth or falsehood:

The right of free public expression does include the right to be in error. Liberty is experimental. Debate itself could not exist unless wrong opinions could be rightfully offered by those who suppose them to be right. But the assumption that the man in error is actually trying for truth is of the essence of his claim for freedom. What the moral right does not cover is the right to be deliberately or irresponsibly in error.²

The point is that news information has the potential to be used, and its use carries implications for the welfare and happiness of others. In extreme cases, the true or false content of a news report can make a difference between life and death for those who choose to act on what they believe to be the information the news contains. It is the consequences of presenting persons with what purport to be facts, information, and truths about the world, knowing that such persons may well make decisions that can affect many aspects of their lives, that is an important source of the professional moral responsibility journalists have in reporting the news. It is the basis for the moral requirement of professional journalistic ethics that investigators and reporters hold themselves to a high standard of truth telling.

DELIBERATE AND INADVERTENT FALSEHOODS

Falsehoods can enter into news reporting in at least two ways: deliberately or inadvertently. Let us consider a typical worst-case scenario of deliberately false news content, in order to better understand why such behavior is professionally unethical. Then we will be in a good position to evaluate the ethics of journalistic truth telling as a moral ideal.

Suppose that a journalist reports on an impending stock market increase in the values of high-tech stocks. The report is complete with graphs and testimony from experts in the field and all the trimmings of a legitimate journalistic analysis of the projected upcoming economic conditions. I watch the report on television and come to believe that the trend described is true. As a result, I withdraw a large amount of my savings to invest in the high-tech market. The report, as it turns out, is a complete fabrication that was intended only to fill air time with something pleasant and uplifting for persons who want to believe that the economy is improving. The graphs are fake, and the interviews are merely arranged with friends to give the impression of the reporter’s having consulted with knowledgeable economists.

Now imagine that the stocks are in fact terribly weak and that the rogue reporter knew this, thereby giving a deliberately misleading picture of the stocks’ prospects. The result is that I may lose my life’s savings or, in any case, suffer a serious loss of money that in turn makes it impossible for me to meet my financial obligations. To be sure, there is a certain amount of inevitable risk in stock market investments. I cannot simply shift the blame for making a bad choice about how to use my money on an unscrupulous news reporter. Still, if the reporter has deliberately misrepresented the facts, then the situation that results is almost as bad as if he or she had assisted in an effort by others to steal my money. We can easily generalize the example to involve, for example, a fisherman’s decision to sail on the basis of a maliciously false news report that the weather will be fine or a student’s decision to move to a certain neighborhood on the basis of a false news report that the neighborhood is safe.

The problem is greater still if news reporters choose not to report on efforts by government officials to subvert the Constitution or make up false reports of such activities that cause civil liberties to be restricted in order to prevent a coup. It is possible as a result to project a continuum of cases that, through irresponsible journalism, finally threaten the very foundations of a free society. The events need not always be quite so dramatic. The same effects can occur slowly and virtually unnoticeably over time through the creeping erosion of social values brought about by the intentional or incompetent mismanagement of news reporting.

Case Study 1

Newsweek and the Holy Koran at Guantanamo Bay

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, four airplanes were hijacked by radical Islamic militants supported by the terrorist network Al Qaeda. The first outrage occurred in the late morning as two of the planes were flown by their hijackers into the World Trade Center in New York City. The World Trade Center itself and several surrounding buildings were demolished, in the course of which approximately three thousand persons lost their lives. A third plane hit the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a fourth, apparently commandeered to strike another target in Washington, possibly the White House, crashed in rural Pennsylvania after angry heroic passengers struggled to gain control of the plane. Following the crackdown on Islamic terrorists worldwide in the aftermath of the Al Qaeda attacks, suspected terrorists arrested in the custody of the United States, many of them combatants captured during subsequent operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, were detained in what has turned out to be a controversial military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

On May 9, 2005, the newsmagazine Newsweek published a story by two of its seasoned reporters, Michael Isikoff and John Barry, purporting to describe culturally insensitive interrogation methods by the American military at Guantánamo. In one particularly objectionable instance, Newsweek reported that soldiers abused and desecrated copies of the Koran, the Moslem holy book, placing them on toilets and, in one case, flushing a copy down a toilet. On the basis of this story, violent anti-American protests in the international Islamic community followed, which the Associated Press reported on May 17, 2005 left at least fourteen people dead in Afghanistan and inflamed an already tense situation of hostility and distrust between Islamic and non-Islamic nations.

Two weeks later, in its May 23 issue, the magazine retracted its story about Guantánamo. Editor Mark Whitaker recanted the allegation in these words: “Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantánamo Bay.” The retraction was in a sense voluntary, but came from the magazine only after severe criticism from American military and other governmental officials demanding that the story be withdrawn. The American Joint Chiefs of Staff on May 16 issued a statement saying “We can’t find anything to substantiate the allegations that appeared in Newsweek.” Indeed, reportedly, upon a review of 25,000 documents from the prison, investigators were able to identify only one incident in the prison logs involving a copy of the Koran. In the case in question, it was not an American soldier, but an Islamic militant detainee at Guantánamo who had supposedly stuffed pages from a copy of the Koran into a toilet in order to protest conditions at the facility.

The occasion for the false report in the magazine seems to have been a confidential informant who in the past had been a highly reliable source of information. This, by itself, in retrospect, was evidently insufficient to guarantee the story’s truth. The effects of the mistaken report have nevertheless had worldwide reverberations, in particular for the credibility of American news reporting, and, needless to say, for the persons killed or injured in the resulting rioting and their families and friends.

QUESTIONS

1. How much damage to individuals and national interests can potentially be indirectly caused by erroneous news reports like the Koran abuse story in Newsweek? What repercussions might there be for American international policy, its war effort in Iraq, and the struggle against global terrorism? Does a news outlet bear any moral responsibility for what others choose to do on the basis of its true or false news reports?

2. What kind of effort does it take to undo the loss of credibility suffered by a news outlet in reporting sensational stories that can lead to loss of life, property, national prestige, and the prosecution of governmental purposes by a false news story once it has been circulated?

3. What precautions would you insist upon if you were the editor overseeing the production of the Guantánamo Koran abuse story? Could the problem have been avoided prior to publication of the story? What general editorial policies should ideally be practiced in order to prevent similar fiascos?

4. How would you answer a critic who might reply that if the story had been true, then it should definitely have been published by the magazine, and that, moreover, if it had, the damage resulting in rioting and loss of life and the effect on American foreign policy and its efforts to contain terrorism worldwide would have occurred anyway? What difference does it make if the story printed by Newsweek were true or false in terms of the consequences that ensued? What is so important about truth in news reporting when the effects of a true or false story are comparable?

5. The Associated Press, after discussing several other recent incidents of plagiarism and false news reporting, closed its dispatch of May 17 with cautionary words: “The Pew Research Center recently released findings that 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing they read in daily newspapers. In the past six months, U.S. newspaper circulation has dropped 1.9 percent on weekdays and 2.5 percent on Sundays, the largest drop for newspapers in more than a decade, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported on May 2.” What can be done to restore reader confidence in the content of newspapers and newsmagazines in the wake of publishing scandals? What would you do as managing editor of a news outlet in order to improve reader confidence after disclosure of a harmful mistaken report?

The same kind of responsibility, to a different degree, attaches to anyone who conveys information to another person. This is why we all have a moral obligation to tell the truth, at least when our audience can reasonably be assumed to know that we are not spinning yarns, telling jokes, writing fiction, rehearsing the lines of a play, or the like. The difference for professional journalists is that they have a special institutional role to play in the dissemination of information. They are thought to have a special authority as dispensers of truth, and they reach many more people than the average person conveying information to a small circle of friends and acquaintances. The kinds of information journalists generally report, moreover, is often of a more serious and potentially consequential sort than that to which ordinary individuals are expected to have access. Hence, journalists once again bear a special moral responsibility, above and beyond the injunction for all persons to tell the truth to the best of their ability. They have an exceptional moral duty to avoid falsehood in their reporting, to correct errors that may have occurred inadvertently in their accounts of facts and current events, and most definitely not to engage in deliberate falsehood. Here is another remarkable case study:

Case Study 2

Staged Incidents in Dateline NBC Investigative Reporting

“On November 17, 1992, Dateline NBC ran a fifteen-minute segment, ‘Waiting to Explode.’ Its focus was the safety of General Motors’ full-size pickup trucks in model years 1973–1987. These trucks were designed with gas tanks mounted outside the frame.

The Dateline report began with the story of Shannon Moseley, a teenager killed in a pickup given to him by his parents. A law officer described Shannon’s screams as he died in the fire. Another segment showed a tearful twenty-two-year-old mother whose two infant daughters died in a similar crash. She could hear their screams as fire engulfed the cab. In this episode, Dateline also showed an empty pickup being hit from the side and bursting into flames. NBC called it ‘an unscientific demonstration’ of how the gas would ignite if the tank were punctured on impact or fuel forced out of the cap.

NBC did not tell viewers that the tank had been filled to the brim and an improper gas cap used to seal it. Dateline NBC did not inform viewers that toy rocket engines had been taped under the truck to ensure a fire even if the tank did not explode or gas did not leak out during the crash test. The incendiary devices were connected to a remote control and activated just before impact. NBC claimed a faulty headlight wire on the old car sent crashing into the pickup had actually sparked the fire, in effect making the flares unnecessary; therefore, they were not mentioned in the program.

And NBC did not tell viewers that its estimates of crash speeds were underplayed for both crashes. All these facts would come to light through the careful investigative work of—not the media—but the corporation whose reputation Dateline had impugned.”³

QUESTIONS

1. Why might Dateline NBC be believed to have followed unethical practice in presenting its exposé of alleged safety hazards involving GM trucks? What, exactly, are they supposed to have done that is morally wrong or offensive? What is the problem posed by this case study for professional journalism?

2. Is staging an event or “re-creation” for the benefit of the camera necessarily morally wrong, if the reporters and producers sincerely believe that a problem exists? What if they are only trying to provide dramatic accompanying footage to illustrate the kind of thing that can happen if appropriate safeguards are not introduced? If this is the rationale for staging an event like the explosion of the GM truck, what accompanying messages, disclosures, or disclaimers should a journalist make in order to avoid misleading viewers and perhaps thereby prevent themselves from being guilty of professional misconduct?

3. To what extent, if any, can the visual medium of television be blamed for encouraging news reporters to contrive incidents in order to re-create or demonstrate previously verified conclusions that they have independently reached? Is it any moral excuse to say that an audience expects and demands dramatic video, such as a truck blowing up on screen, in order to believe that vehicles of a certain type might be dangerous to own and operate? If you find the Dateline NBC program to be morally at fault in this incident, does it make any difference in your judgment, whether or not it is true as a matter of fact, that the vehicles in question are actually dangerous and that what the report showed is something that could happen...