Last Updated: March 23, 1999
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Ethics codes
and beyond
Shouldn’t ethics conversations be as routine as RSI
training or sexual harassment seminars? Only a handful of newspapers discuss
their principles regularly
Several years ago, while I was still at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
a reporter and a photographer accompanied some cops in St. Charles County
to raid a house where a pornographic video business was thought to be operating.
We published three photographs from the ride-along on the front page of
our St. Charles zoned edition.
A few days later, the case collapsed. The search warrants were faulty,
and some of the officers turned out to have been moonlighting as security
guards for the very people under suspicion.
Shortly thereafter, I got a letter from the homeowner, asking who gave
us the right to enter his house and take pictures of places that he and
his wife considered private. He had a point, our lawyer said.
So I asked the editor responsible for coverage in St. Charles County
what conversations had preceded the decision to accompany the police. Were
privacy issues discussed?
He looked at me as if I had just landed from Mars. “It was routine,”
he said, in a tone you might reserve for people who have trouble adding
two and two.
Later, and cooled down, I reflected that this actually might be the
perfect answer to questions relating to ethical decision-making. That is,
I envisioned an ideal in which ethical considerations were treated as routine
— as routine in the life of a story as those involving headline size, the
use of graphics, prominence of display and so forth. I envisioned an ideal
in which ethical decision-making would become one of the basic skills of
reporters and editors and its practice would be an everyday activity.
Many papers now provide diversity training to help journalists in newsrooms
that increasingly are multicultural. They provide RSI training to acquaint
journalists with ergonomically efficient work habits. They provide EEO
and sexual harassment training so editors will take the laws and regulations
into consideration as they hire and promote and deal with things that may
turn workplaces into hostile environments.
All of this training has become routine in newsrooms. Neglecting it
can be costly. But what about ethical decision-making? There also are costs
— in credibility as well as dollars — for newsrooms that neglect ethics.
Has ethical decision-making become a part of the regular staff-development
programs of news organizations?
I asked some editors and ethicists whether newspapers are supplementing
written ethics codes and policies with formal staff development in ethical
decision-making. My sample was small and selective, but what I found is
consistent with what I have heard and seen over many years.
The answer depends on what is meant by staff development. If you think
of ethical decision-making as a formal or delineated system, involving
specific steps and procedures (as advocated by such ethicists as Robert
Steele of The Poynter Institute and Joann Byrd of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer),
then I would say that few newspapers have staff development programs. I
myself do not know of any, but there may be some.
“Journalists are very wary of anything that can be seen as rigorous,”
says Michael Josephson, the founder of the Josephson Institute of Ethics
in Los Angeles, who has consulted with such papers as the San Jose (Calif.)
Mercury News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Orange County Register,
Santa Ana, Calif. “They don’t want to be tied into methodology. There’s
almost a macho pride about ad hoc-ism.”
If, however, you think of staff development as frequent discussions
about ethical issues that involve significant numbers of reporters or editors,
I would say the practice is getting established. Increasingly, I believe,
newsrooms are growing sensitive to ethical issues — and with excellent
reason.
The surveys show a public that has a deepening lack of confidence in
the ethics of journalists. A recent poll by The Freedom Forum’s Media Studies
Center, for example, shows that 88 percent of the public think reporters
often or sometimes use unethical or illegal tactics in investigating stories.
Three-quarters say journalists copy the words and ideas of others and pass
them off as their own. About two-thirds believe journalists often or sometimes
make up stories and pass them off as real.
While most papers I looked at had occasional or periodic sessions
devoted to ethics, three struck me as exemplary. They were the Chicago
Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Jose Mercury News. In recent months,
the Tribune has addressed ethical issues in two significant forums — occasional
large-scale meetings called in response to particular events or developments
and frequent smaller ones (what one participant called “rump sessions”)
where specific news decisions are made.
Examples of the first include the wide-ranging staff discussions of
the coverage implications of the Jonesboro, Ark., killings; of the lessons
from the cases of Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle at The Boston Globe
and Philip Glass of The New Republic and of the problems raised in the
Clinton/Lewinsky coverage by news reports emanating from other organizations.
These meetings involved panel discussions and reports from the staff and
Tribune journalists.
The rump sessions are convened after the nightly news meeting by managing
editor Ann Marie Lipinski, who told me she likes the input of the “smartest
people in the office” before making decisions.
For example, when the news broke that U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde, whose district
lies in the western suburbs of Chicago, had an extramarital relationship
many years ago, Lipinski collected the smart people in her office (the
Washington bureau was represented by speaker phone). Their opinions ranged
putting the story on the front page to skipping it entirely, as non-newsworthy
or beneath the paper’s standards. As a result of the discussion, Lipinski
chose to play the article on the front — not as breaking story but as an
analysis of a new political environment in Washington.
“Everybody felt good about it,” she said, “even those who lost — if
that’s the word — the argument. They felt we’d been responsible.”
For more than a decade, the Philadelphia Inquirer has been conducting
staff seminars led by top-level newsroom editors and Katherine Hatton,
the paper’s general counsel. The leadership team meticulously makes its
way throughout the paper, including its remote bureaus, so that every Inquirer
journalist becomes part of the process, over and over again.
“What we find,” said Hatton, “is that people have widely different perceptions
of what practices are acceptable.”
The seminars, she said, are not held to make decisions or adopt procedures
but to get the broadest possible range of opinion so that editors can develop
a framework for considering ethically sensitive issues.
For several years, the Mercury News has been conducting internal discussions
on accuracy and fairness. From time to time, executive editor Jerry Ceppos
writes a column about some of the problems the paper has encountered. In
1998, the Mercury News held nine weekly meetings to address a range of
subjects across the ethical landscape: naming juveniles and rape victims,
deceptive charts and photographs, sharing stories with sources before publication
and so forth. Both staff and the public were invited, and the sessions
attracted more than 100 people. Ethical decision-making can never be part
of a newsroom’s routine unless the people, from top to bottom, are sensitive
to ethical issues and apprehend them — not only in particular stories or
photographs but in the way the paper approaches news.
The papers I have cited are excellent examples — although by no means
the only ones — of organizations that are determined to make their staffs
ethically aware. They have taken the indispensable first step.
Yet, I think there is more to be done. Is there a better way to make
ethical decisions than in ad hoc situations? Is there a way for newsrooms
to satisfactorily reconcile widely different ideas of the “acceptable,”
which at bottom means reconciling different values or principles?
I believe there is, and it lies in adopting a methodology — a delineated
procedure, involving certain consistent steps that lead a newsroom to make
decisions that reflect ethical considerations. The procedures may vary
from organization to organization, and they should not lead to decisions
that are predictable or preordained. News, after all, and the circumstances
in which it occurs are always changing, requiring responses that reflect
the complexities of the moment.
But a newsroom’s methodology for addressing ethical issues should ensure
always that these matters are taken up in settings that have become familiar
to the staff, that an appropriate number of voices or opinions always have
been heard and that ethical values or principles have always been clearly
articulated.
If these things occur routinely, a newsroom’s judgments are likely to
be justifiable not only for their journalistic quality but also for their
ethical sensitivity.
Woo, former editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, teaches journalism
at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.
