Student Journalists' Ethical Approaches to Coverage Of
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Student Journalists’ Ethical Approaches to Coverage of Campus Sexual Misconduct A thesis presented to the faculty of the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Science Megan E. Reed August 2018 © 2018 Megan E. Reed. All Rights Reserved. This thesis titled Student Journalists’ Ethical Approaches to Coverage of Campus Sexual Misconduct by MEGAN E. REED has been approved for the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism and the Scripps College of Communication by Bill Reader Associate Professor of Journalism Scott Titsworth Dean, Scripps College of Communication ii Abstract REED, MEGAN E., M.S., August 2018, Journalism Student Journalists’ Ethical Approaches to Coverage of Campus Sexual Misconduct Director of Thesis: Bill Reader Sexual misconduct, particularly on college campuses, has gained media attention in recent years due to policy changes in universities’ handling of cases, student activism, and several high-profile cases involving universities. Student newspapers have been tasked with covering assault on their own campuses, and those student journalists are in the unique position of covering a sensitive issue that involves their peers and, in some cases, involves the journalists themselves. This thesis includes qualitative interviews with 20 current and former student journalists who covered campus sexual misconduct at their student newspapers. The journalists interviewed described their sexual assault coverage as different from other stories they had covered, and the journalists encountered several difficult ethical dilemmas throughout the reporting processes. Although the journalists dealt with internal biases and many struggled with emotional connections to the stories and their sources, they still strived for objectivity by focusing on the journalistic values of fairness and balance. iii Table of Contents Page Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Literature Review.................................................................................................................2 Background ..............................................................................................................2 Student Journalists Covering Sexual Assault ........................................................14 Journalism Ethics When Covering Sexual Assault ................................................18 Fairness and Balance..............................................................................................18 Conflict of Interest .................................................................................................21 Sensitivity vs. Obligation to Inform.......................................................................22 Privacy vs. Public’s Right to Know .......................................................................26 Research Questions ............................................................................................................42 Method ...............................................................................................................................45 Identifying Potential Research Subjects and Refining Research Questions ..........45 Subject Recruitment ...............................................................................................46 Qualitative Interviewing and Subject Debriefing ..................................................48 Interview Protocols: Priming, Structured, and Unstructured Questions ................50 Results ................................................................................................................................52 Discussion ..........................................................................................................................67 Objectivity in Covering Sexual Assault as a Crime...............................................69 Conflict of Interest and Personal Connections to Assault .....................................72 Concern about Negative Effect of Stories .............................................................76 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................79 References ..........................................................................................................................84 iii Introduction While sexual assault has long been a problem on college campuses, the issue gained considerable public attention in the 2010s amid several high-profile incidents. The complexities of the problem often leave university administrators struggling to find a balance between protecting their campuses from threats to student safety and ensuring that students accused of assault receive due process and are not unfairly punished by either their universities or their peers (Novkov, 2016; Triplett, 2012; Hendrix, 2013). Although they are not responsible for investigating assaults or sanctioning perpetrators, student journalists are faced with another difficult decision—reconciling their duty to inform their communities with their own roles as students and their responsibility to minimize harm to all parties in their reporting. This thesis explores the ethical implications for student journalists in the United States who covered sexual assault issues on their own campuses. The qualitative study is particularly concerned with the issues of journalistic fairness and balance in covering such a serious and controversial issue. The study includes interviews with 20 media professionals who have covered sexual assault as student journalists or editors, focusing on how the journalists operationalized the principles of “fairness” and “balance” in their coverage of assault and how they deliberated and made various ethical decisions while covering the issue on their campuses. 1 Literature Review Background Many students are angered by the rates of sexual assault reported on college campuses—an estimated 27 percent of women and 8 percent of men had been sexually assaulted during their college years, according to a 2015 campus climate survey report from the Association of American Universities (AAU, 2015). However, it is difficult to accurately determine rates of assault because many students who are assaulted never officially report it. More than 90 percent of campuses reported zero rapes in 2014, according to an American Association of University Women analysis (Becker, 2015). Various factors can affect survey data, including collection mode, response rate, question wording and the survey’s definition of assault (Sinozich and Langton, 2014), so some surveys vary from the widely reported 27 percent statistic. For example, the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, surveyed female students ages 18 to 24 from 1995 to 2013 and found that about 6 out of 1,000, or 0.6 percent, of students reported they had been victims of assault (Sinozich and Langton, 2014). One controversial aspect of the debate about sexual assault focuses on exaggerated or outright false accusations of assault and their frequency, although the consensus is that false claims are rare. The International Association of Chiefs of Police’s (IACP) policy and accompanying issues paper states that for a case to qualify as a false accusation, a thorough investigation must determine that an assault did not occur (IACP, 2005). According to the IACP, some factors that may lead people to believe an 2 accusation is false include delay in reporting, an accuser’s alcohol or drug use, the person’s sexual history, and discrepancies in the person’s recollections (p. 13). A 2010 study applied the IACP’s criteria for a false accusation to 136 cases reported at a large northeastern university over a 10-year period and found that eight, or 5.9 percent, of the allegations were false (Lisak et al., 2010). People also have different definitions of what constitutes sexual assault, and people may lie to researchers because the topic of assault is viewed by many as taboo (McArdle, 2015). Also, in 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation changed its definition of rape to include victims of any gender and remove the requirement that the assault was forcible. The previous definition had only acknowledged female victims and had required the assault to be “forcible” (FBI, 2013). Although false allegations do occur, they are relatively rare (Lisak et al., 2010; Lonsway, 2010). The issues of sexual assault and harassment gained attention in late 2017 with the rise of the “#MeToo” movement, which encouraged victims of assault and harassment to openly discuss their experiences and called for the perpetrators to face consequences. The movement had started years earlier: In 2006, Tarana Burke, an activist and sexual assault survivor, coined the phrase “Me Too” as a way for other survivors of sexual violence, particularly girls and women of color, to show support for each other (Johnson and Hawbaker, 2018). More than a decade later, in October 2017, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted, “If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write 'me too' as a reply to this tweet,” and by the next morning, almost 40,000 people had responded with their own experiences (Stevens, 2017). Over the next few months, several high-profile men were 3