Ethics 101

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Think it’s easy? You be the editor

By Ted Pease

“This is making me CRAZY!” the student, a senior business major, wrote in a recent e-mail. “I thought taking this class would help me understand the media better, and it does I guess. But the more we read and talk about this stuff, the more I feel like screaming.

“I wanted to strangle one of the members of my discussion group last week,” she said.

As you can see, it’s been another interesting week in my senior Media Ethics class at USU.

The “stuff” to which this angst-ridden student referred was the content of some case studies we’ve been going over, first in the students’ discussion groups, which meet outside of class during the week, and then in email and in-class exchanges.

“There are no answers to some of these things.” The student’s e-mail, full of capital letters and @%!!~&%*??/+&!@**$!!!, etc., had been sent late at night, apparently after one of the group discussions. “There are just no answers to some of these things. I just wouldn't publish anything at all. Why don’t journalists just murder each other in the newsroom every day!?”

Just the names of the discussion groups (or “salons,” à la Gertrude Stein, et al) offer a sense of how conflicted these collisions with ethical decision-making have made students this quarter — “Dazed & Confused,” “The Sequestered,” “The Ruthless,” “The Dilemmas,” “Gone Fishin’,” etc.

The fact that there often are no easy answers to many of the ethical decisions journalists have to make every day is something that escapes many who consume the news and take it for granted, as much part of our daily lives in the information age as water is for a fish. It’s only when that environment gets a bit toxic that people start to gasp and hyperventilate. Like my ethics students.

For journalists, however, difficult either-or decisions come every day, in quandaries large and small. It is this kind of balancing act between the public’s “right to know” about issues in the community and, often, individual privacy concerns that journalists have to perform all the time.

To illustrate that point I’d like to conduct a little experiment.

Back in the 1980s, Mike Davies, then-editor of the Hartford (Conn.) Courant, asked his newspaper’s readers to judge some real-world but hypothetical journalistic decisions. “We realize that simply getting the facts straight is not enough,” Davies wrote in an op-ed column. “Editors wrestle daily with the thorny questions of fairness, compassion, taste and privacy. Sometimes our decisions to publish are criticized, especially when readers think the stories are ‘cheap shots’ . . . or lacking in sensitivity.”

Davies offered some hypothetical cases, all based on real stories, and asked 10 of his editors and as many Hartford readers as wanted to participate to take the quiz. In Hartford, families and Boy Scout troops and elementary school classes took the challenge, and the Courant received 699 responses.

So I offer the same opportunity to consider how you’d decide things differently if you sat in the editor’s chair.

• CASE No. 1: A woman claims she was raped in a poolroom by a gang of men while a crowd of onlookers cheered. Several men are subsequently arrested and a trial is set. The case draws national attention. The woman testifies at the trial against the defendants. A local cable TV station broadcasts the trial, allowing viewers to know the woman’s identity. In addition, several other newspapers in the area publish the woman’s name.

Do you publish her name, too? __ Yes. __ No.

• CASE No. 2: A member of the town council is raped. The woman, a conservative and anti-feminist, has repeatedly blocked the expenditure of public funds for a rape crisis center at a local hospital. Soon after the attack, the council member tells you on the record that she plans to rethink her position on the crisis center. She also makes clear the deep personal trauma she is suffering since the assault, but asks that you not say in the story that she had been raped.

__ Choice 1: Do you go ahead with the whole story, including her change of mind, recognizing that the shift is a significant public policy development?

__ Choice 2: Do you refer in your story to the attack simply as an assault, but report that the convalescing council member is rethinking her position on the crisis center, thus suggesting the nature of the attack?

__ Choice 3: Do you report the assault without saying it was a sexual attack, but decide that when the council member actually votes for the rape crisis center you will report the reasons for her change of position, regardless of whether she wants to talk about it?

• CASE No. 3: The mayor of a small town is a real hard-liner on crime and has made local drug enforcement a major issue, publicly berating judges for handing down “light sentences” in drug cases. The mayor’s 19-year-old son, who lives at home and attends the local junior college, is arrested for possession of a small amount of marijuana, a misdemeanor.

Do you run the story on the arrest? __ Yes. __ No. And on what page?

Would you run the story differently if the arrest were for selling a pound of marijuana?

__ Yes. __ No. How?

Would you run the story differently if the arrest were for using cocaine? __ Yes. __ No. How?

Would you run the story differently if the arrest were for selling cocaine? __ Yes. __ No. How?

• CASE No. 4: A prominent local businessman who has long been associated with many charitable causes is discovered to have embezzled $10,000 from one of the charities he heads. There is no question about his guilt, although police have not yet filed charges. No one else knows about the story. When your report contacts him for comment, he breaks down and begs for a chance to make restitution without the story appearing. He says there are extenuating circumstances that he can’t explain now. He also says his wife is in critical condition at a local hospital after suffering a heart attack, and that publicity resulting from the story would surely kill her.

__ Choice 1: Would you run the story now?

__ Choice 2: Would you wait until you have the chance to talk with the wife’s doctors to make sure she’s out of danger, and then run the story?

__ Choice 3: Would you give him a chance to pay the money back and run nothing if he does?

Make your decisions and get them back to me via e-mail (ted.pease@usu.edu); I’ll report the results compared to the Hartford editors, the Hartford readers, my ethics students, and the Herald-Journal editors, in my next column. You be the editor.

(The column first appeared in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal 5/11/97)