The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman

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СКАЧАТЬ think back to the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 when the Miami Herald showed how lax zoning, inspection and building codes had contributed to the massive destruction. Homes and lives are safer today as a result.

      In 2016, the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia exposed how opioids had flooded the state’s depressed communities, contributing to the highest death rates in the country.

      In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana’s newspapers were indispensable sources of reliable information for residents.

      The Washington Post in 2007 revealed the shameful neglect and mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital. Corrective action was immediate.

      The Associated Press in 2015 documented a slave trade behind our seafood supply. Two thousand slaves were freed as a result.

The New York Times and The New Yorker in 2017 exposed sexual predators in elite boardrooms. A movement of accountability for abuses against women took root.

      The New York Times in 1971 was the first to publish the Pentagon Papers, revealing a pattern of official deceit in a war that killed more than 58,000 Americans and countless others.

      The Washington Post broke open the Watergate scandal in 1972. That led ultimately to the president’s resignation.

      Those news organizations searched for the truth and told it, undeterred by pushback or pressure or vilification.

      Facing the truth can cause extreme discomfort. But history shows that we as a nation become better for that reckoning. It is in the spirit of the preamble to our Constitution: “to form a more perfect union.” Toward that end, it is an act of patriotism.

      W.E.B. Du Bois, the great scholar and African American activist, cautioned against the falsification of events in relating our nation’s history. In 1935, distressed at how deceitfully America’s Reconstruction period was being taught, Du Bois assailed the propaganda of the era.

      “Nations reel and stagger on their way,” he wrote. “They make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth be ascertainable?”

      At this university, you answer that question with your motto – “Veritas.” You seek the truth – with scholarship, teaching and dialogue – knowing that it really matters.

      My profession shares with you that mission – the always arduous, often tortuous and yet essential pursuit of truth. It is the demand that democracy makes upon us. It is the work we must do.

      We will keep at it. You should, too. None of us should ever stop.

      This is excerpted from the commencement address that the writer, then executive editor of The Washington Post, delivered to the graduating class of Harvard University on May 28, 2020.

      [T]he always arduous, often tortuous and yet essential pursuit of truth ... is the demand that democracy makes upon us.

      Point of View

      Decision-Making in the Digital Age

      By James M. Naughton

      Sound judgment pays homage to speed but reveres accuracy.

WE TEND IN NEWSROOM DISCUSSIONS to separate news judgment from other aspects of the craft, as if it were something only a few people can master and for which they should be paid extra.

      But making sound judgments is a responsibility of every journalist at every level in broadcast, print, or new media. We constantly exercise news judgment in choosing what to report, whom to interview, whom to trust, how to illustrate, what to amplify, what to omit, how to make the story interesting, when to quote or paraphrase, when and where – or whether – to run the article, what the headline should be, when to follow up, and how to correct inevitable errors.

      The problem nowadays is that we’re expected to make the right calls on the run. We used to spend some of our time working to double‐ or triple‐check information, to verify, to research context, to scour complementary and contradictory data, to think and then to craft an accurate and coherent account. Many journalists now spend valuable time scanning the web and surfing cable channels to be sure they’re not belated in disclosing what someone else just reported, breathlessly, using sources whose identity we’ll never know.

      The digital age does not respect contemplation. The deliberative news process is being sucked into a constant swirl of charge and countercharge followed by rebuttal and rebuttal succeeded by spin and counterspin leading to new charges and countercharges.

Now there are no cycles, only Now. A journalist today is apt to be wedging someone else’s information into a story nanoseconds before air time or press run, without the debate about tone and propriety we Watergate geezers could have with our editors.

      When it’s all‐news‐all‐over, the demand is too often for the new, not necessarily for news. We need to elevate, not debase, news judgment. Sound judgment pays homage to speed but reveres accuracy. News judgment can abet courage or invoke caution. News judgment is conscious and conscientious. It is authoritative but not judgmental. It relates the new to the known. And it must not go out of fashion, no matter how difficult the circumstances now. Ignore “Hard Copy.” Read Matt Drudge for entertainment, not sourcing. Muster courage to pursue your own story, one that can be vouched for. Tell the viewer or reader what we don’t know, can’t prove, didn’t have time to figure out.

       This is excerpted from an essay that the writer, then president of the Poynter Institute, published in The New York Times on February 16, 1998.

4 For Journalists, a Clash of Moral Duties Responsibilities as professionals and as human beings can conflict.

      Learning Goals

      This chapter will help you understand:

       how journalists sometimes find that their work comes into conflict with their moral obligations as individuals;

       why journalists should, in the abstract, avoid being involved with the events and the people they cover;

       the kinds of situations in which journalists have to decide whether to stop being observers and become participants; and

       guidelines that can help journalists make those decisions.

WHEN HURRICANE KATRINA struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, journalists arriving to report the disaster often felt morally obliged to assume the role of relief workers. Assessing their experience a few months later in American Journalism Review, Rachel Smolkin found

countless acts of kindness by journalists who handed out food and water to victims, pulled them aboard rescue boats or out of flooded cars, offered them rides to safer ground, lent them cell phones to reassure frantic family members, and flagged down doctors and emergency workers to treat them.1

      At first glance the decision to stop reporting and help may seem obvious: journalists, after all, are human beings. However, their professional responsibility makes the decision more complex. СКАЧАТЬ