Living by the core principle of integrity

When newspapers approach the community with accuracy, fairness and independence, the public answers with their trust and respect

By Joann Byrd

Newspapers need to get back in the habit of living by our core principles, even when there isn’t time to think in mushy ethical terms and even when we are juggling the usual thousand other things.

And we need to make it obvious to the public (the people we work for) that we have heard their dismay and we are working to earn their trust again and to contribute to an informed, engaged citizenry.

We need to do those things on behalf of our integrity. Integrity, being largely about doing what we said we were going to do, is an honorable end in itself. But I’d wager that when we act with integrity and readers know it, we also contribute to our credibility. In fact, it’s hard to imagine newspapers earning credibility without first demonstrating journalistic integrity.

The value of credibility is not lost on the members of ASNE.

But newspaper editors and their staffs could use some tools to enhance their newspaper’s integrity while the clock is ticking and the pressure is rising.

The ASNE Ethics and Values committee has set about creating and delivering those tools.

One will help editors and their staffs create a climate where plain-English discussions of ethical behavior are routine and safe (not to say, cool).

Another that could launch by the April 2002 convention is a series of interactive decision-making templates on the ASNE web site. Facing an ethical question, a journalist can download the applicable guide and use it — as if she were making a plane reservation or ordering a book online — to work through the issue and reach a choice that allows her to sleep well at night.

We will be building on the impressive work our predecessors did in the Journalism Credibility Project.

Our efforts are based on the notion that it is not the newspaper’s pure motives that readers care about, nor our desire to beat the competition, nor even our merciless deadlines.

What readers care about is that we serve the public by delivering news and information they can trust to be accurate and fair and produced not to benefit our own fortunes or those of our friends and advertisers, but to benefit the broad spectrum of readers.

That’s pretty much what we have promised by declaring we produce a mainstream daily newspaper. We’ve had some awful slips in the last few years, but we’ve never announced that newspapers have adopted different standards. So the public reasonably expects us to be accurate and fair, serving them alone — or at least first.

At the same time, readers assume we will be abiding by the rules that members of our society are obliged to follow: keep promises, respect human beings, do not deceive, act justly, do no unnecessary harm.

As part of our implied contract, professions are allowed to violate those everyday rules when we have a good-enough reason. A good-enough reason in our case is a reason we can anticipate our readers will respect when we explain it on the front page.

When people trust that we are keeping our promises about accuracy, fairness and independence, they’re more likely to presume we have sufficient reason to invade their neighbor’s privacy. They’re also more apt to take at face value the explanation we are smart enough to publish.

When people don’t trust that we’re sticking to our bargain, they’re just not so inclined to like our reasoning — or even to presume it took place. To many of those former or temporary readers we have become one more business, writing new rules and routinely trying to justify our actions by appeal to the First Amendment.

This does not sound like integrity. And it doesn’t develop into credibility.

This would be a good time to beef up our discussions of those old core principles and within that culture, to sharpen our skills at making ethical decisions.

Right after that would be a good time to make our thinking and our decisions transparent.

ASNE’s Ethics and Values Committee is working as fast as we can to lend a hand with both.

Byrd is editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and new chair of ASNE’s Ethics and Values Committee.

The Newspaper Credibility Handbook, the culmination of a four-year ASNE initiative designed to bring issues related to our credibility with readers into focus, is now available for $15.

For details on how you can order a copy, go to http:// www.asne.org/kiosk/reports/publist.htm. There is a $5 shipping charge per order.