Last Updated: May 26, 1999
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Institute for Journalism Excellence
Project opened my eyes to personal ethics issue
By Beth Haller
During my summer at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, the project
I worked on set me once again on a quest to understand personal ethics
in the context of journalistic behavior. My reporting there threatened
to rip into a moral/ethical hornet’s nest in California.
The topic: Immigration.
The question of morally correct journalistic behavior always intrigued
me — even when I was a 22-year-old beginning newspaper journalist in Texas.
I constantly obsessed about the sacred cows that a newspaper protected
or the problems caused by bad (or sometimes good) reporting. I found that
this summer, 14 years later, that my idealistic obsession with the effect
of journalism on the people, issues, and community reported upon is still
there.
From the outset, I understood my personal biases about immigration and
those of many Californians, but that seemed to make the project even more
difficult.
The first part of the project was a computer-assisted analysis of U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service data from 1980 to 1995. I looked
for trends in immigration in a four-county area, and it was an enjoyable
and educational endeavor because I was becoming proficient in database
and spreadsheet software.
Because I was new to San Jose, the Mercury News’ database editor helped
guide me toward trends in the data that had not been covered by census-related
stories in 1991. Several interesting patterns emerged, such as the surge
in Vietnamese immigrants into the area, the youthful age of immigrants
(a huge number were under 30), and the occupation categories of family-sponsored
immigrants.
I began to focus on this last issue because it was something never reported
upon and had some dramatic findings. For example, more than 50 percent
of the family-sponsored adult immigrants coming into the region fell into
the category of having "no occupation," meaning they were unemployed, retired,
homemakers or students.
During my reporting, it became clear that this finding had implications
for the new family sponsorship rules to be released by the INS this summer.
These rules are tied to the welfare and immigration reform laws passed
in 1996 and lay down income requirements for sponsors, as well as the possibility
of prosecution if an immigrant they sponsor ends up using a welfare program.
But it also became clear that my findings might give some ammunition
to the anti-immigration faction in California. I feared their interpretation
of the "no occupation" category for most family-sponsored immigrants would
be much different from mine. They could blanket their Web site about unemployed
immigrants flooding the country.
So the moral dilemma rattled in my head as I worked on my story — was
I just fueling more anti-immigrant sentiment with my simple computer-assisted
reporting project?
I tried to contextualize the story so as to avoid this. For example,
INS officials I spoke to were not worried about my findings. They clearly
explained that family sponsorship was about reunifying families, not occupation
status. The INS Web page clearly states national numbers for the "no occupation"
category.
Local immigrants and immigrant service organizations explained the dire
circumstances that some immigrants, especially refugees, are leaving in
their home country. An immigrant’s goal, they said, is typically to bring
their family back together, but also to work or gain an education as well.
My findings, however, had implications for the new INS sponsorship rules
— and that was the true focus of the story. Sponsors will now have to guarantee
that their family members will not become a burden on U.S. society.
I also became aware of the cultural implications of these rules for
people from very diverse countries. Looking at the situation from a Western
perspective, one might say that the new rules will stop some people from
bringing over their elderly mother or their nephew, who might one day become
disabled on the job.
But as one Vietnamese immigrant, now a successful businessman, told
me, family is everything in his culture. The emphasis on a family being
together and whole is predominant in many cultures. So my story tried to
contrast the individualistic and economic nature of this new U.S. policy
with the very different perspective of many of the immigrants it covers.
The first draft of the resulting story was slanted. My fears about bolstering
the anti-immigration stance bent the story too far the other direction.
But in the end, the crucial role of good editing was able to temper
my moral dilemma. The editor of the story was adept at putting a more even
balance into the structure of the story.
Due to that wonderfully honed journalistic tradition of proper editing,
many of my fears and biases stayed within me, where they belonged, rather
than being in the story.
But the journey of evaluating my personal ethics in the context of reporting,
though troubling at times, also reminded me that’s where some of my passion
for journalism resides. And I hope I can transmit to my students that the
murky, messy, morally challenging dilemmas that face reporters are some
of what keeps daily journalism so interesting.
Haller, an assistant professor at Towson University in Towson, Md.,
spent her summer at the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News.
