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Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis PART 1 News emocratic theory gives the press a crucial role. In traditional democracies, educa- tion and information are the pillars on which a free society rests. Informed public opinion is typically believed to be a weapon of enormous power—indeed, the cor- Dnerstone of legislative government. Therefore, a free press is central to Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of politics, for example; Jefferson characteristically referred to an independent information system as “that liberty which guards our other liberties.”1 Because of the press’s privileged position (commonly termed the enlightenment func- tion), outside critics and inside leaders have persistently urged it toward responsible behav- ior. Thomas Jefferson himself lamented how such a noble enterprise could degrade itself by publishing slander and error. Joseph Pulitzer worried that without high ethical ideals, news- papers would fail to serve the public and could even become dangerous. Early in the seven- teenth century, the French moralist La Bruyère chided newswriters for reporting trivia and demeaning their high obligation: “They lie down at night in great tranquility upon a piece of news . which they are obliged to throw away when they awake.” A few years earlier, John Cleveland cautioned against respecting the authors of memoirs, “for that would be knight- ing a Mandrake . and giving an engineer’s reputation to the maker of mousetraps.”2 Modern criticisms of journalism seem merely to echo complaints that are centuries old. However, the number of today’s cavilers and the bitterness of their attacks set the present decade apart. A free press remains our national glory in a complicated world where expecta- tions of journalistic performance are higher than ever before. Actually, the intense and wide- spread criticism may have yielded a modest dividend: Never before have the media been so aware of the need for responsible behavior. A self-conscious quality hangs heavily over newsrooms and professional conventions. Aside from the bandits and the pompous who remain untouched by any attacks, some move- ment is evident. How can journalists fulfill their mission credibly? Should Pulitzer Prizes be given to reporters who use deception to get a story? Why not form an ethics committee? Are codes of ethics helpful? Should journalism schools teach ethics courses or not? Such well- intentioned questions crop up more and more. The cases in Part 1 present the primary issues and problems that are currently being debated among those with a heightened awareness of journalism’s ethical responsibility. The fresh interest in ethics and the profit to be gained from working through these cases may be threatened by the Western press’s commitment to independence. There is a rhetoric from as far back as Jefferson, who called for a nation “where the press is free.” Others have Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 30 PART ONE News argued: “You cannot chain the watchdog”; “The First Amendment guarantees the news media’s independence”; “Allowing controls by anyone makes us a mockery.” And in countries where free- dom is valued above all, accountability is not often understood clearly. Accountability, properly re- quested and unreservedly given, is alien territory. Although the belief in a free press is sincere and of critical importance, it often plays tricks on the press’s thinking about ethics. Ethical principles concerning obligation and reckoning do not find a natural home within a journalism hewn from the rock of negative freedom. Part 1 advocates freedom of the press, but it promotes an account- able news system and attempts to provide content for that notion. Ethical questions concerning conflict of interest, truthfulness, privacy, social justice, confiden- tiality, and the other issues we address here must be considered in an environment of stress. The lat- est Gallup polls reveal press credibility at 16 percent in the United States, the lowest figure in decades and an alarming one by anyone’s measure. For some, it represents kicking the chair on which you stubbed your toe. The anxieties experienced in a nation uncertain of its world leadership role often provoke outbursts against the messenger. Nonetheless, we must continue working on media ethics, even in these hard times. Restrictions tend to make newspersons feel stifled, yet the contemporary cultural climate demands that journalism employ restraint and sobriety.3 Although all the problems cannot be solved in the five chapters in this section, the analysis and resolution of the moral dilem- mas presented here address matters of high priority on the journalist’s agenda. LEARNING OBJECTIVES The learning objectives for Part 1, Chapters 1– 5, are straightforward but tremendously important: • Know the pressures from businesses and the new technologies that influence ethical reporting • Understand the nature of truth and its centrality in news • Understand the importance of ethics for source–reporter relationships • Distinguish reporting that recognizes issues of social justice from journalism that is insensi- tive to these issues • Explain how the public’s right to know must be balanced against the public’s right to privacy NOTES 1. Thomas Jefferson, “Address to Philadelphia Delegates,” 25 May 1808, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew J. Lipscomb (Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903), vol. 16, 304. For similar highly quoted passages, see his “Letter to Marquis De Lafayette,” 4 November 1823, and his “Letter to Dr. James Currie,” 18 January 1786, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), vol. 4, 132. 2. La Bruyère and Cleveland are quoted in William Rivers, Wilbur Schramm, and Clifford Christians, Responsibility in Mass Communication, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 2. 3. An important line of scholarship accounts for some of these shifts and stresses by understanding news as social narrative. See Gertrude J. Robinson, “Making News and Manufacturing Consent: The Journalistic Narrative and Its Audience,” in Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent, eds, Theodore L. Glasser and Charles T. Salmon, (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), ch. 14, 348–369; James A. Ettema and Theodore L. Glasser, Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1998); Stuart Allan, News Culture (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 1999); and Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis CHAPTER 1 Institutional Pressures illiam Peter Hamilton of The Wall Street Journal once argued that “a newspaper is private enterprise owing nothing whatever to the public, which grants it no franchise. It is emphatically the property of the owner, who is selling a manu- Wfactured product at his own risk.”1 This is an extreme statement, yet over the past two centuries many U.S. publishers and broadcasters have shared this attitude. Based on the principles of classical democracy and traditional capitalism, the individual’s right to publish has been a strongly held convention. This mood may be shifting somewhat, at least in theory. Increasingly, enlightened newspaper owners and executives realize their special obligation precisely because news— and not widgets—is their business. In First Amendment perspective, journalism is in fact a business, but of a particular kind. Nothing is more difficult in the mass media enterprise than promoting the public good, even though the rewards—professionally and financially—are not commensurate with such altruism. In actual practice, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to separate the media’s fi- nancial interests from the public’s legitimate news interests. The Constitution protects the media from government constraint, but the news is under the perpetual risk of corporate control. Granted, a conflict between the public’s need for unpolluted information and the stockholders’ need for profit is not inevitable. Needing to earn a respectable income and de- ciding to stop a dead-ended investigation could both be appropriate; moral questions emerge when the two are connected as cause and effect. Without a press pool to help pay expenses for a charter plane, a minor party candidate could not conduct a modern political campaign. One person serving in two potentially conflicting capacities—for example, as executive for Columbia Broadcasting and board member for Columbia University—may indeed be work- ing ethically.2 Not every owner or executive is automatically suspect. Nonetheless, ever since mass communications took on the character of big business at the turn of the twentieth century, there have been built-in commercial pressures. The angry critic Upton Sinclair said accusingly in 1920: “The Brass Check is found in your pay envelope each week . the price of your shame—you who take the fair body of truth and sell it in the marketplace, who betray the virgin hopes of mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Busi- ness.”3 As the ominous trend continues toward concentrated ownership of media properties, 31 Copyright Material – Provided by Taylor & Francis 32 PART ONE News cost-conscious publishers threaten to overwhelm the press’s noble mission.4 The five cases that fol- low demonstrate how media practitioners are often caught in conflicting duties to their employers, to their readers or viewers, and to their own professional conscience. The cases