Measuring our ethical problems
By Doug Fisher
I opened a file drawer the other day and realized I now
have a firm measure of journalism’s recent ethical woes — almost
2 feet.
That’s how much space the files on our industry’s ethics issues
and transgressions take up in that drawer. Four or five inches wait to
be filed. Most of it is from the past couple of years, and even given
my pack rat proclivities, that ’s depressing.
The bulging folders have the expected headings:
plagiarism, made-up quotes, anonymous sources, conflicts of interest,
questionable reporting. There’s also a “general” file, though I have
been tempted at times to label it “clueless,” with stories
such as that of an Arizona TV reporter who donated to the local sheriff
and then reported a 30-year-old rape allegation against the sheriff’s
election opponent. The reporter said he didn't remember signing the station's
ethics guidelines that prohibit political donations.
Steve Blust, executive editor of The Beaufort
(S.C) Gazette, recently told a South Carolina Press Association gathering
of copy editors that perhaps one positive
thing to come from all this will be greater recognition of the value of copy
desks.
Before Beaufort, Blust oversaw copy desks
at California’s Sacramento Bee,
which lately has been battling its own ethical demon – one of its most
popular columnists who, the paper says, appears to have been a serial fabricator
of sources.
The first inkling something was wrong came
from a copy editor who asked for more details, including the name of a
bar the columnist had written about – pretty
basic stuff.
Similarly, it was a young copy editor who
had sense to change the out-of-whack time elements in Detroit Free Press
columnist Mitch Albom’s story about
two former college basketball players supposedly attending an NCAA Final Four
game. The story was written and sent ahead of time. The pair never showed.
Unfortunately, the copy editor was at the
paper in Duluth, Minn., not at the Free Press. The Detroit paper’s lengthy report on what happened leaves
the impression of a copy desk cowed by the star status managers had given Albom.
With Web logs and the Internet, stories
that might have stayed local or merited a brief in one of the trade magazines
now go worldwide within
hours.
Internal
newsroom memos stick to Jim Romenesko’s column on Poynter.org like Velcro.
It's an explanation of why we hear a quickening
drumbeat of ethical miscues, but hardly reassuring. That logic means we
find ourselves
arguing it’s
always gone on, but now it's just being found out more. In other words, the emperor
has no clothes.
So it’s worth taking Blust’s advice: Let your copy editors edit.
They are there to do more than just fix
the grammar and style, write the headline and lay out the page. As in
Sacramento, they
must be
able to ask
basic, sometimes
tough, questions of assigning editors and reporters.
If you have hired well, you have people
who are paid to assume the role of the reader, to assume most of our readers
know more than
we do (it
was readers
who
blew the whistle on Albom) and to ask the tough questions in their
stead. Relegating them to essentially just proofreading is wasting
resources.
But making sure your copy desk is empowered
is not enough. As in too many journalism textbooks, ethics remains back-of-the-book
stuff in
newsrooms fighting daily
to get the paper out or the show on the air. It’s not enough to give someone
an ethics policy and tell him or her to read and acknowledge it. Our problems
are rarely that simple.
The idea isn’t to preach ethics, but to integrate ethical thinking into
every facet of the newsroom. Here are a couple of ways you might do that:
•
Make sure a discussion of ethics is part of every job review – a discussion,
not a sermon or a confessional. Try these questions: How have our guidelines
on doing your job ethically helped you in the past year? Have there been times
you found those guidelines hurt your ability to do what you thought needed to
be done? You might be surprised at the answers.
•
The military has after-action reports. Newsrooms should, too. Assign an editor
to review each week’s or month’s coverage and highlight those cases
that exemplify your ethics policy's ideals – you do have one, don’t
you? – and those where things skirted the line. Hold brown bag lunches
and dinners to discuss it. And rotate the duties among all your editors, including
lifestyle and sports, to ensure everyone is part of the process.
Let’s hope that when I open that
file drawer in a year or two, I don’t
need a yardstick – or worse, a tape measure.
Mark Magie, publisher of the Cabot Star-Herald
in Arkansas proves that everyone, especially me, needs a sharp-eyed
editor. In last
month's
column on commas,
one of the questions was about this sentence: As writers,
readers, and proofreaders four of us believe that this
sentence should
have three
commas.
I wrote: "The …writer is correct with four commas, assuming she keeps
the serial comma after “readers.” Put a comma between “proofreaders” and “four.”
As Magie noted, I meant to write that she
would be correct with three commas. Good catch, Mark!
