Media ethics issues and cases 9th edition

iMedia Ethics

Issues and Cases

Ninth Edition

Philip Patterson Oklahoma Christian University

Lee Wilkins Wayne State University

University of Missouri

Chad Painter University of Dayton

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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https://www.rowman.com
iii For Linda, David, and Laurel

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ivBrief Contents

Foreword Preface

1 An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making 2 Information Ethics: A Profession Seeks the Truth 3 Strategic Communication: Does Client Advocate Mean Consumer Adversary? 4 Loyalty: Choosing Between Competing Allegiances 5 Privacy: Looking for Solitude in the Global Village 6 Mass Media in a Democratic Society: Keeping a Promise 7 Media Economics: The Deadline Meets the Bottom Line 8 Picture This: The Ethics of Photo and Video Journalism 9 Informing a Just Society

v 10 The Ethical Dimensions of Art and Entertainment 11 Becoming a Moral Adult References Index

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viContents

Foreword Preface

1 An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making Essay: Cases and moral systems

Deni Elliott Case 1-A: How to read a case study

Philip Patterson

2 Information Ethics: A Profession Seeks the Truth Case 2-A: Anonymous or confidential: Unnamed sources in the news

Lee Wilkins Case 2-B: Death as content: Social responsibility and the documentary filmmaker

Tanner Hawkins Case 2-C: News and the transparency standard

Lee Wilkins Case 2-D: Can I quote me on that?

Chad Painter Case 2-E: NPR, the New York Times, and working conditions in China

Lee Wilkins vii Case 2-F: When is objective reporting irresponsible reporting?

Theodore L.Glasser Case 2-G: Is it news yet?

Michelle Peltier Case 2-H: What’s yours is mine: The ethics of news aggregation

Chad Painter

3 Strategic Communication: Does Client Advocate Mean Consumer Adversary? Case 3-A: Weedvertising

Lee Wilkins Case 3-B: Cleaning up their act: The Chipotle food safety crisis

Kayla McLaughlin and Kelly Vibber Case 3-C: Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ prescription drug choices

Tara Walker Case 3-D: Between a (Kid) Rock and a hard place

Molly Shor Case 3-E: Was that an Apple computer I saw? Product placement in the United States and abroad

Philip Patterson Case 3-F: Sponsorships, sins, and PR: What are the boundaries?

Lauren Bacon Brengarth Case 3-G: A charity drops the ball

Philip Patterson

4 Loyalty: Choosing Between Competing Allegiances Case 4-A: Fair or foul? Reporter/player relationships in the sports beat

Lauren A. Waugh Case 4-B: To watch or to report: What journalists were thinking in the midst of disaster

Lee Wilkins Case 4-C: Public/on-air journalist vs. private/online life: Can it work?

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Madison Hagood Case 4-D: When you are the story: Sexual harassment in the newsroom

Lee Wilkins Case 4-E: Whose Facebook page is it anyway?

Amy Simons viii Case 4-F: Where everybody knows your name: Reporting and relationships in a small market

Ginny Whitehouse Case 4-G: Quit, blow the whistle, or go with the flow?

Robert D. Wakefield Case 4-H: How one tweet ruined a life

Philip Patterson

5 Privacy: Looking for Solitude in the Global Village Case 5-A: Drones and the news

Kathleen Bartzen Culver Case 5-B: Concussion bounty: Is trust ever worth violating?

Lee Wilkins Case 5-C: Joe Mixon: How do we report on domestic violence in sports?

Brett Deever Case 5-D: Looking for Richard Simmons

Lee Wilkins Case 5-E: Children and framing: The use of children’s images in an anti-same-sex marriage ad

Yang Liu Case 5-F: Mayor Jim West’s computer

Ginny Whitehouse Case 5-G: Politics and money: What’s private and what’s not

Lee Wilkins

6 Mass Media in a Democratic Society: Keeping a Promise Case 6-A: Reporting on rumors: When should a news organization debunk?

Lee Wilkins Case 6-B: Doxxer, Doxxer, give me the news?

Mark Anthony Poepsel Case 6-C: The truth about the facts: Politifact.com

Lee Wilkins Case 6-D: WikiLeaks

Lee Wilkins Case 6-E: Control Room: Do culture and history matter in reporting the news?

Lee Wilkins ix Case 6-F: Victims and the press

Robert Logan Case 6-G: For God and Country: The media and national security

Jeremy Littau and Mark Slagle

7 Media Economics: The Deadline Meets the Bottom Line Case 7-A: Murdoch’s mess

Lee Wilkins Case 7-B: Who controls the local news? Sinclair Broadcasting Group and “must-runs”

Keena Neal Case 7-C: Automated journalism: The rise of robot reporters

Chad Painter Case 7-D: Contested interests, contested terrain: The New York Times Code of Ethics

Lee Wilkins and Bonnie Brennen Case 7-E: Transparency in fundraising: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting standard

Lee Wilkins Case 7-F: News now, facts later

Lee Wilkins

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Case 7-G: Crossing the line? The LA Times and the Staples affair Philip Patterson and Meredith Bradford

8 Picture This: The Ethics of Photo and Video Journalism Case 8-A: Killing a journalist on-air: A means/ends test

Mitchel Allen Case 8-B: Remember my fame: Digital necromancy and the immortal celebrity

Samantha Most Case 8-C: Problem photos and public outcry

Jon Roosenraad Case 8-D: Above the fold: Balancing newsworthy photos with community standards

Jim Godbold and Janelle Hartman Case 8-E: Horror in Soweto

Sue O’Brien Case 8-F: Photographing funerals of fallen soldiers

Philip Patterson

x 9 Informing a Just Society Case 9-A: Spotlight: It takes a village to abuse a child

Lee Wilkins Case 9-B: 12th and Clairmount: A newspaper’s foray into documenting a pivotal summer

Lee Wilkins Case 9-C: Cincinnati Enquirer’s heroin beat

Chad Painter Case 9-D: Feminist fault lines: Political memoirs and Hillary Clinton

Miranda Atkinson Case 9-E: GoldieBlox: Building a future on theft

Scott Burgess

10 The Ethical Dimensions of Art and Entertainment Case 10-A: Get Out: When the horror is race

Michael Fuhlhage and Lee Wilkins Case 10-B: To die for: Making terrorists of gamers in Modern Warfare 2

Philip Patterson Case 10-C: Daily dose of civic discourse

Chad Painter Case 10-D: The Onion: Finding humor in mass shootings

Chad Painter Case 10-E: Hate radio: The outer limits of tasteful broadcasting

Brian Simmons Case 10-F: Searching for Sugar Man: Rediscovered art

Lee Wilkins

11 Becoming a Moral Adult References

Index

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Foreword Clifford G. Christians

Research Professor of Communication, University of Illinois–Urbana

The playful wit and sharp mind of Socrates attracted disciples from all across ancient Greece. They came to learn and debate in what could be translated as “his thinkery.” By shifting the disputes among Athenians over earth, air, fire, and water to human virtue, Socrates gave Western philosophy and ethics a new intellectual center (Cassier 1944).

But sometimes his relentless arguments would go nowhere. On one occasion, he sparred with the philosopher Hippias about the difference between truth and falsehood. Hippias was worn into submission but retorted at the end, “I cannot agree with you, Socrates.” And then the master concluded: “Nor I with myself, Hippias. . . . I go astray, up and down, and never hold the same opinion.” Socrates admitted to being so clever that he had befuddled himself. No wonder he was a favorite target of the comic poets. I. F. Stone likens this wizardry to “whales of the intellect flailing about in deep seas” (Stone 1988).

With his young friend Meno, Socrates argued whether virtue is teachable. Meno was eager to learn more, after “holding forth often on the subject in front of large audiences.” But he complained, “You are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. . . . You are exactly like the flat stingray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb.”

Philosophy is not a semantic game, though sometimes its idiosyncrasies feed that response into the popular mind. Media Ethics: Issues and Cases does not debunk philosophy as the excess of sovereign reason. The authors of this book will not encourage those who ridicule philosophy as cunning xiirhetoric. The issue at stake here is actually a somewhat different problem—the Cartesian model of philosophizing.

The founder of modern philosophy, René Descartes, preferred to work in solitude. Paris was whirling in the early 17th century, but for two years even Descartes’s friends could not find him as he squirreled himself away studying mathematics. One can even guess the motto above his desk: “Happy is he who lives in seclusion.” Imagine the conditions under which he wrote “Meditations II.” The Thirty Years’ War in Europe brought social chaos everywhere. The Spanish were ravaging the French provinces and even threatening Paris, but Descartes was shut away in an apartment in Holland. Tranquility for philosophical speculation mattered so much to him that upon hearing Galileo had been condemned by the Church, he retracted parallel arguments of his own on natural science. Pure philosophy as an abstract enterprise needed a cool atmosphere isolated from everyday events.

Descartes’s magnificent formulations have always had their detractors, of course. David Hume did not think of philosophy in those terms, believing as he did that sentiment is the foundation of morality. For Søren Kierkegaard, an abstract system of ethics is only paper currency with nothing to back it up. Karl Marx insisted that we change the world and not merely explain it. But no one drew the modern philosophical map more decisively than Descartes, and his mode of rigid inquiry has generally defined the field’s parameters.

This book adopts the historical perspective suggested by Stephen Toulmin: The philosophy whose legitimacy the critics challenge is always the seventeenth century tradition founded primarily upon René Descartes. . . . [The] arguments are directed to one particular style of philosophizing—a theory-centered style which poses philosophical problems, and frames solutions to them, in timeless and universal terms. From 1650, this particular style was taken as defining the very agenda of philosophy (1988, 338).

The 17th-century philosophers set aside the particular, the timely, the local, and the oral. And that development left untouched nearly half of the philosophical agenda. Indeed, it is those neglected topics—what I here call “practical philosophy”—that are showing fresh signs of life today, at the very time when the more familiar “theory-centered” half of the subject is languishing (Toulmin 1988, 338).

This book collaborates in demolishing the barrier of three centuries between pure and applied philosophy; it joins in reentering practical concerns as the legitimate domain of philosophy itself. For Toulmin, the primary focus of ethics has moved from the study to the bedside to criminal courts, engineering labs, the newsroom, factories, and ethnic street corners. Moral philosophers are not being asked to hand over their duties to

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technical experts xiii in today’s institutions but rather to fashion their agendas within the conditions of contemporary struggle.

All humans have a theoretical capacity. Critical thinking, the reflective dimension, is our common property. And this book nurtures that reflection in communication classrooms and by extension into centers of media practice. If the mind is like a muscle, this volume provides a regimen of exercises for strengthening its powers of systematic reflection and moral discernment. It does not permit those aimless arguments that result in quandary ethics. Instead, it operates in the finest traditions of practical philosophy, anchoring the debates in real-life conundrums but pushing the discussion toward substantive issues and integrating appropriate theory into the decision-making process. It seeks to empower students to do ethics themselves, under the old adage that teaching someone to fish lasts a lifetime, and providing fish only saves the day.

Media Ethics: Issues and Cases arrives on the scene at a strategic time in higher education. Since the late 19th century, ethical questions have been taken from the curriculum as a whole and from the philosophy department. Recovering practical philosophy has involved a revolution during the last decade in which courses in professional ethics have reappeared throughout the curriculum. This book advocates the pervasive method and carries the discussions even further, beyond freestanding courses into communication classrooms across the board.

In this sense, the book represents a constructive response to the current debates over the mission of higher education. Professional ethics has long been saddled with the dilemma that the university was given responsibility for professional training precisely at the point in its history that it turned away from values to scientific naturalism. Today one sees it as a vast horizontal plain given to technical excellence but barren in enabling students to articulate a philosophy of life. As the late James Carey concluded,

Higher education has not been performing well of late and, like most American institutions, is suffering from a confusion of purpose, an excess of ambition that borders on hubris, and an appetite for money that is truly alarming (1989, 48).

The broadside critiques leveled in Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America (1918) and Upton Sinclair’s The Goose Step (1922) are now too blatantly obvious to ignore. But Media Ethics: Issues and Cases does not merely demand a better general education or a recommitment to values; it strengthens the communications curriculum by equipping thoughtful students with a more enlightened moral awareness. Since Confucius, we have understood that lighting a candle is better than cursing the darkness, or, in Mother Teresa’s version, we feed the world one mouth at a time.

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xivPreface

More than three decades ago, two of us began the quest of delivering a media ethics textbook grounded in the theory of moral philosophy and using case studies for students to be able to apply the theory learned. In our planning, the book would begin and end with theory—moral philosophy and moral development, respectively—and the chapters in between would be topical and cross all mediums. So instead of chapter titles such as “journalism” or “public relations” you see titles such as “loyalty” and “privacy.”

Despite the passage of decades, our foundational assumption remains that the media and democracy need one another to survive. If there is a single animating idea in this book, it is that whether your focus is entertainment, news, or strategic communication, whether your role is that of a professional or a parent, your “job” is made easier in a functioning democracy. And democracy functions best with a free and independent mass media that spurs change, reifies culture, and provides opportunity to read and think and explore and create. We believe that thinking about and understanding ethics makes you better at whatever profession you choose—and whatever your role when you get home from work. This book remains optimistic about the very tough times in which we find ourselves.

Let’s begin with what’s been left out and conclude with what you’ll find in the text. First, you’ll find no media bashing in this book. There’s enough of that already, and besides, it’s too easy to do. This book is not designed to indict the media; it’s designed to train its future practitioners. If we dwell on ethical lapses from the past, it is only to learn from them what we can do to prevent similar occurrences in the future. Second, you’ll find no conclusions in this book—neither at the end of the book nor after each case. No one has xvyet written the conclusive chapter to the ethical dilemmas of the media, and we don’t suspect that we will be the first.

All along, the cases were to be the “stars” of the book—mostly real life (as opposed to hypothetical), usually recent and largely guest-written, especially when we could find someone who lived in close proximity to the market where the case study happened. We would end each case with pedagogical questions. These began, at the lowest level, with the actual details of the case and were called “micro issues.” The questions then went out in ever-widening concentric circles to larger issues and deeper questions and eventually ended at debating some of the largest issues in society such as justice, race, fairness, truth-telling, media’s role in a democracy, and many others. We called these “macro issues.” The questions were not answered in the textbook. It was left to the student and the professor to arrive at an answer that could be justified given the ethical underpinnings of the text.

This simple idea became popular and subsequent editions added to the depth of the chapters and the recency of the cases. As the field changed and student majors within the field changed, so did the book. Some additions, including an “international” chapter and a “new media” chapter, came and went, and the material was absorbed in other places in the book. Writing about “public relations” became “strategic communications” with all the nuances that entailed. Social media rocked our industry and changed our economic model, and the book followed with the obvious ethical issues that citizen journalism brought with it. At every stage, it remained a true media ethics textbook and not simply a journalism ethics book. Both the current chapters and current cases bear that out.

This ninth edition brings with it many changes, the major ones being a new publisher, a new co-author, and a new chapter on social justice. More than half of all cases also are new. But a large amount of the text remains the same and a significant minority of the cases also remain in the textbook. These decisions mirror the state of the field of media ethics: some of the problems media professionals face today are new; others are as old as our professions.

Each of us bears a significant debt of gratitude to families, to teachers and mentors, to colleagues, and to our new and delightful publisher. We acknowledge their contributions to our intellectual and moral development in making this textbook possible, and we accept the flaws of this book as our own.xvi

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11 An Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to

• recognize the need for professional ethics in journalism • work through a model of ethical decision-making • identify and use the five philosophical principles applicable to mass communication situations

MAKING ETHICAL DECISIONS

No matter your professional niche in mass communication, the past few years have been nothing short of an assault on the business model that supports your organization and pays your salary, on the role you play in a democratic society, on whether your job might be better—and certainly more cheaply—done by a robot or an algorithm.

Consider the following ethical decisions that made the news:

• the New York Times choosing to call President Donald J. Trump a liar in its news columns as well as on the editorial pages. National Public Radio made a different decision, refusing to use the word in its news coverage;

• Facebook users who, in the last two weeks of the US presidential election, chose to share “news stories” originating with Russian bots more frequently than they shared news stories from legitimate news organizations. Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg continued to assert that Facebook is not a media organization;

• 2the Gannett Corporation and Gatehouse Media closed down copy desks at individual newspapers in favor of a regional copy hub system, thereby ensuring that local news would no longer be edited in individual media markets;

• H&R Block purchasing “native advertising” that included a photo of a woman “taking a break” after filling out her name and address on her income tax forms. Native advertising is now found ubiquitously online and in legacy publications such as the New York Times and the Atlantic. Comedian John Oliver has skewered the practice in multiple segments, noting, “It’s not trickery. It’s sharing storytelling tools. And that’s not bullshit. It’s repurposed bovine waste”;

• television journalists and other cable personalities charging their employers, specifically Fox News management, with systemic sexual harassment;

• films such as Get Out—with its blend of horror and science fiction—that included some subtle and some in-your-face messages about race—earning critical and box office success. The year before Get Out was released, the Academy Awards were the focus of furious criticism for a lack of diversity in nominations, the Oscar-so-white movement;

• and last, but in many ways the most central, President Donald J. Trump, less than six months into his administration, labeling “the media” as the enemy of the people, a characterization that was greeted with anger and alarm by some and embraced by others.

In a campaign video released in August 2017, the day after the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, killed one and injured many others, African-American journalist April Ryan stated that she and other journalists had been singled out as an “enemy of the White House.” The video, titled “Let President Trump do his job” included small images of a dozen journalists while the voiceover described “the media attacking our president” and referred to “the president’s enemies” who “don’t want him to succeed.” Ryan, a veteran White House correspondent for the American Urban Radio Networks and a political analyst for CNN, responded with a tweet castigating the campaign’s “racial hate.”

Each of these instances represent an ethical choice, decisions that most often begin with individuals but are 14

Each of these instances represent an ethical choice, decisions that most often begin with individuals but are then reinforced by the profit-making organizations for which they work or by the social organizations in which people willingly participate. Almost all of them include the element of melding roles—am I acting as a news reporter or as a consumer, as a private citizen or as a professional, as an audience member who understands that comedians can sometimes speak a certain sort of truth, or as an objective 3 reporter for whom words that imply or state an opinion are forbidden. As young professionals, you are told to “promote your own brand” while simultaneously promoting your client, your news organization, or your profession. It’s a staggering array of requirements and obligations, made more difficult by the very public nature—and the potential public response—that your decisions will inevitably provoke. A simple Google search of each of the foregoing ethical choices will open up a world of conflicting opinions.

The Dilemma of Dilemmas The summaries above are dilemmas—they present an ethical problem with no single (or simple) “right” answer. Resolving dilemmas is the business of ethics. It’s not an easy process, but ethical dilemmas can be anticipated and prepared for, and there is a wealth of ethical theory—some of it centuries old—to back up your final decision. In this chapter and throughout this book, you will be equipped with both the theories and the tools to help solve the dilemmas that arise in working for the mass media.

In the end, you will have tools, not answers. Answers must come from within you, but your answers should be informed by what others have written and experienced. Otherwise, you will always be forced to solve each ethical problem without the benefit of anyone else’s insight. Gaining these tools also will help you to prevent each dilemma from spiraling into “quandary ethics”—the feeling that no best choice is available and that everyone’s choice is equally valid (see Deni Elliott’s essay following this chapter).

Will codes of ethics help? Virtually all the media associations have one, but they have limitations. For instance, the ethics code for the Society of Professional Journalists could be read to allow for revealing or withholding information, two actions that are polar opposites. That doesn’t make the code useless; it simply points out a shortfall in depending on codes.

While we don’t dismiss codes, we believe you will find more universally applicable help in the writings of philosophers, ancient and modern, introduced in this chapter.

This book, or any ethics text, should teach more than a set of rules. It should give you the skills, analytical models, vocabulary, and insights of others who have faced these choices, to make and justify your ethical decisions.

Some writers claim that ethics can’t be taught. It’s situational, some claim. Because every message is unique, there is no real way to learn ethics other than by daily life. Ethics, it is argued, is something you have, not something you do. But while it’s true that reading about ethics is no guarantee you will perform your job ethically, thinking about ethics is a skill anyone can acquire.

4While each area of mass communication has its unique ethical issues, thinking about ethics is the same, whether you make your living writing advertising copy or obituaries. Thinking about ethics won’t necessarily make tough choices easier, but, with practice, your ethical decision-making can become more consistent. A consistently ethical approach to your work as a reporter, designer, or copywriter in whatever field of mass communication you enter can improve that work as well.

Ethics and Morals Contemporary professional ethics revolves around these questions:

• What duties do I have, and to whom do I owe them? • What values are reflected by the duties I’ve assumed?

Ethics takes us out of the world of “This is the way I do it” or “This is the way it’s always been done” into the realm of “This is what I should do” or “This is the action that can be rationally justified.” Ethics in this sense is “ought talk.” The questions arising from duty and values can be answered a number of ways as long as they are consistent with each other. For example, a journalist and a public relations professional may see the truth of a story differently because they see their duties differently and because there are different values at work in their professions, but each can be acting ethically if they are operating under the imperatives of “oughtness” for their profession.

It is important here to distinguish between ethics, a rational process founded on certain agreed-on principles, and morals, which are in the realm of religion. The Ten Commandments are a moral system in the Judeo- Christian tradition, and Jewish scholars have expanded this study of the laws throughout the Bible’s Old

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Testament into the Talmud, a 1,000-page religious volume. The Buddhist Eightfold Path provides a similar moral framework.

But moral systems are not synonymous with ethics. Ethics begins when elements within a moral system conflict. Ethics is less about the conflict between right and wrong than it is about the conflict between equally compelling (or equally unattractive) alternatives and the choices that must be made between them. Ethics is just as often about the choices between good and better or poor and worse than about right and wrong, which tends to be the domain of morals.

When elements within a moral system conflict, ethical principles can help you make tough choices. We’ll review several ethical principles briefly after describing how one philosopher, Sissela Bok, says working professionals can learn to make good ethical decisions.

A Word about Ethics

The concept of ethics comes from the Greeks, who divided the philosophical world into separate disciplines. Aesthetics was the study of the beautiful and how a person could analyze beauty without relying only on subjective evaluations. Epistemology was the study of knowing, debates about what constitutes learning and what is knowable. Ethics was the study of what is good, both for the individual and for society. Interestingly, the root of the word means “custom” or “habit,” giving ethics an underlying root of behavior that is long established and beneficial to the ongoing of society. The Greeks were also concerned with the individual virtues of fortitude, justice, temperance, and wisdom, as well as with societal virtues such as freedom.

Two thousand years later, ethics has come to mean learning to make rational decisions among an array of choices, all of which may be morally justifiable, but some more so than others. Rationality is the key word here, for the Greeks believed, and modern philosophers affirm, that people should be able to explain their ethical decisions to others and that acting ethically could be shown to be a rational decision to make. That ability to explain ethical choices is an important one for media professionals whose choices are so public. When confronted with an angry public, “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time” is a personally embarrassing and ethically unsatisfactory explanation.

5BOK’S MODEL

Bok’s ethical decision-making framework was introduced in her book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. Bok’s model is based on two premises: that we must have empathy for the people involved in ethical decisions and that maintaining social trust is a fundamental goal. With this in mind, Bok says any ethical question should be analyzed in three steps.

First, consult your own conscience about the “rightness” of an action. How do you feel about the action? Second, seek expert advice for alternatives to the act creating the ethical problem. Experts, by the way, can

be those either living or dead—a producer or editor you trust or a philosopher you admire. Is there another professionally acceptable way to achieve the same goal that will not raise ethical issues?

Third, if possible, conduct a public discussion with the parties involved in the dispute. These include those who are directly involved such as a reporter or their source, and those indirectly involved such as a reader or a media outlet owner. If they cannot be gathered—and that will most often be the case—you can conduct the conversation hypothetically in your head, playing 6out the roles. The goal of this conversation is to discover How will others respond to the proposed act?

Let’s see how Bok’s model works in the following scenario. In the section after the case, follow the three steps Bok recommends and decide if you would run the story.

How Much News Is Fit to Print? In your community, the major charity is the United Way. The annual fundraising drive will begin in less than two weeks. However, at a late-night meeting of the board with no media present, the executive director resigns. Though the agency is not covered by the Open Meetings Act, you are able to learn most of what went on from a source on the board.

According to her, the executive director had taken pay from the agency by submitting a falsified time sheet while he was actually away at the funeral of a college roommate. The United Way board investigated the absence and asked for his resignation, citing the lying about the absence as the reason, though most agreed that they would have given him paid leave had he asked.

The United Way wants to issue a short statement, praising the work of the executive director while regretfully accepting his resignation. The executive director also will issue a short statement citing other opportunities as his reason for leaving. You are assigned the story by an editor who does not know about the additional information you have obtained but wants you to “see if there’s any more to it [the resignation] than they’re telling.”

You call your source on the board and she asks you, as a friend, to withhold the damaging information 16

You call your source on the board and she asks you, as a friend, to withhold the damaging information because it will hinder the United Way’s annual fund-raising effort and jeopardize services to needy people in the community because faith in the United Way will be destroyed. You confront the executive director. He says he already has a job interview with another non-profit and if you run the story you will ruin his chances of a future career.

What do you do?

THE ANALYSIS

Bok’s first step requires you to consult your conscience. When you do, you realize you have a problem. Your responsibility is to tell the truth, and that means providing readers with all the facts you discover. You also have a larger responsibility not to harm your community, and printing the complete story might well cause short-term harm. Clearly, your conscience is of two minds about the issue.

7You move to the second step: alternatives. Do you simply run the resignation release, figuring that the person can do no further harm and therefore should be left alone? Do you run the whole story but buttress it with board members’ quotes that such an action couldn’t happen again, figuring that you have restored public trust in the agency? Do you do nothing until after the fundraising drive and risk the loss of trust from readers if the story circulates around town as a rumor? Again, there are alternatives, but each has some cost.

In the third step of Bok’s model, you will attempt to hold a public ethical dialogue with all of the parties involved. Most likely you won’t get all the parties into the newsroom on deadline. Instead you can conduct an imaginary discussion among the parties involved. Such a discussion might go like this:

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: “I think my resignation is sufficient penalty for any mistake I might have made, and your article will jeopardize my ability to find another job. It’s really hurting my wife and kids, and they’ve done nothing wrong.” REPORTER: “But shouldn’t you have thought about that before you decided to falsify the time sheet? This is a good story, and I think the public should know what the people who are handling their donations are like.” READER 1: “Wait a minute. I am the public, and I’m tired of all of this bad news your paper focuses on. This man has done nothing but good in the community, and I can’t see where any money that belonged to the poor went into his pocket. Why can’t we see some good news for a change?” READER 2: “I disagree. I buy the paper precisely because it does this kind of reporting. Stories like this that keep the government, the charities and everyone else on their toes.” PUBLISHER: “You mean like a watchdog function.” READER 2: “Exactly. And if it bothers you, don’t read it.” PUBLISHER: “I don’t really like to hurt people with the power we have, but if we don’t print stories like this, and the community later finds out that we withheld news, our credibility is ruined, and we’re out of business.” [To source] “Did you request that the information be off the record?” SOURCE: “No. But I never thought you’d use it in your story.” REPORTER: “I’m a reporter. I report what I hear for a living. What did you think I would do with it? Stories like these allow me to support my family.” EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: “So it’s your career or mine, is that what you’re saying? Look, no charges have been filed here, but if your story runs, I look like a criminal. Is that fair?” PUBLISHER: “And if it doesn’t run, we don’t keep our promise to the community. Is that fair?” NEEDY MOTHER: “Fair? You want to talk fair? Do you suffer if the donations go down? No, I do. This is just another story to you. It’s the difference in me and my family getting by.”

8The conversation could continue, and other points of view could be voiced. Your imaginary conversations could be more or less elaborate than the one above, but out of this discussion it should be possible to rationally support an ethical choice.

There are two cautions in using Bok’s model for ethical decision-making. First, it is important to go through all three steps before making a final choice. Most of us make ethical choices prematurely, after we’ve consulted only our consciences, an error Bok says results in a lot of flabby moral thinking. Second, while you will not be endowed with any clairvoyant powers to anticipate your ethical problems, the ethical dialogue outlined in the third step is best when conducted in advance of the event, not in the heat of writing a story.

For instance, an advertising copywriter might conduct such a discussion about whether advertising copy can ethically withhold disclaimers about potential harm from a product. A reporter might conduct such a discussion well in advance of the time he is actually asked to withhold an embarrassing name or fact from a story. Since it is likely that such dilemmas will arise in your chosen profession (the illustration above is based on what happened to one of the authors the first day on the job), your answer will be more readily available and more logical if you hold such discussions either with trusted colleagues in a casual atmosphere or by yourself, well in advance of the problem. The cases in this book are selected partially for their ability to predict your on-the-job dilemmas and start the ethical discussion now.

17

GUIDELINES FOR MAKING ETHICAL DECISIONS

Since the days of ancient Greece, philosophers have tried to draft a series of rules or guidelines governing how to make ethical choices. In ethical dilemmas such as the one above, you will need principles to help you determine what to do amid conflicting voices. While a number of principles work well, we will review five.

Aristotle’s Golden Mean Aristotle believed that happiness—which some scholars translate as “flourishing”—was the ultimate human good. By flourishing, Aristotle sought to elevate any activity through the setting of high standards, what he called exercising “practical reasoning.”

Aristotle believed that practical reason was exercised by individuals who understood what the Greeks called the “virtues” and demonstrated them 9in their lives and calling. Such a person was the phrenemos, or person of practical wisdom, who demonstrated ethical excellence in his or her daily activity. For Aristotle, the highest virtue was citizenship, and its highest practitioner the statesman, a politician who exercised so much practical wisdom in his daily activity that he elevated the craft of politics to art. In contemporary terms, we might think of a phrenemos as a person who excels at any of a variety of activities—cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the late poet Maya Angelou, filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. They are people who flourish in their professional performance, extending our own vision of what is possible.