Media Ethics - from Winning with the News Media

When I mentioned journalistic ethics in a seminar, a middle-aged police chief interrupted. "Reporters have no ethics," he grumbled. "They’ll do whatever it takes to get a story. They have no conscience. They make up the rules as they go along."

Sometimes, I conceded, that’s true. Since the beginning of this nation, the media’s ethics have been in constant flux. Some of the ethic is written, some spoken. Some simply understood among editors and reporters. That’s what makes it seem so amorphous and strange to outsiders.

Who Regulates the Media?

The ethics for many professions are enforced through state or federal law, usually through regulatory bodies created by statute. Many people who deal with the news media believe there should be similar supervision of the news media.

But the First Amendment keeps popping up:

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press …

There was a period in the 1970s and 1980s when the media did a lot to clean up their act. Part of it was the aftermath of Watergate. The media had turned the spotlight on public officials in a new, no-holds-barred way. Before Watergate, the media had often participated in a conspiracy of silence about certain kinds of things that went on behind the scenes in government; certain kinds of behavior among power people, politicians, and media people themselves. (See INSIDE THE MEDIA/Privacy)

If we’re going to hold politicians and public officials to a certain standard, the media reasoned, we’ll have to live by those same standards. People who live in glass houses, the old saying goes, shouldn’t throw stones. Journalists have traditionally been the stone-throwers in this society.

And for the first time, the media were willing to report on each other without pulling their punches. Another contributing factor for that was new, increased competition. Newspapers were especially eager to trash their new television competitors, whom they feared and despised. (See STRATEGY/Selling Your Story)

Ethics Erosion in the 90s

Unfortunately (in my opinion) a much sharper increase in competition in the 1990s has led to a massive erosion of media ethics and responsibility.

I blame that deterioration primarily on a shift in American media ownership. Television networks, many local TV stations, and about 80 percent of all daily American newspapers are now owned by large, distant corporations.

This is a major cultural shift for the United States. Until the 1970s, most American newspapers were locally owned, usually by a local family, and very provincial.

Unlike other industrial countries, the U.S. has very few national dailies sold all over the country. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today are about the only ones. With weekday circulation of 2.2 million, USA Today is America’s largest daily. Japan’s largest daily, Yomiuri Shimbun, sells 14 million.

The Bottom-Line Mentality

The people with final power in the corporations that own today’s media rarely have experience as reporters or editors. They have no experience with journalistic ethics. They have a bottom-line mentality. Their primary allegiance is to their stockholders. They crave Wall Street’s blessing. If there is a conflict between responsible journalism and profit, profit usually wins.

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This chapter continues with an account of the reign of Mark Willes as CEO of Times-Mirror Corp. He was a former executive at General Mills. Because he killed projects that had high respect in journalistic circles but were not especially profitable, reporters at the Los Angeles Times called him "The Cereal Killer" behind his back. Many of his decisions to increase profits drew scathing national criticism.

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Newspapers’ Terminal Illness

The newspaper as we have known it cannot survive much longer. People will still want printed news, but they will have to print it themselves. Because they had been dominant so long, it took a long time for newspaper people to realize the new technology was taking over.

When they finally grasped what was happening in the mid-1990s, they went into survival panic mode. In the evolution of organisms and organizations, the will to survive is often much more powerful than the will to be responsible and ethical.

As the L.A. Times episode illustrated, corporate executives with no background in journalism often have a tin ear for ethical tunes. They simply do not understand what all the fuss is about.

Some cynics question whether the new ownership calls for another look at the First Amendment. The "press" is the only for-profit business granted unlimited Constitutional protection. The Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the media’s evolving financial structure.

When journalists break their own rules, there are things you can do about it, if you understand the traditional ethic, and the levers of power. I’ll try to explain some of those rules, and how you can wield power as a reader/viewer/listener/consumer.

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This chapter continues with detailed explanations of the out-take ethic; reporters' relationships with their sources; reporters as witnesses in grand jury and court proceedings; staging; photo opportunities; dramatizations in news stories; examples of rigged news stories; doctored photographs in newspapers; recent cases of misleading electronic insertions in TV news stories; junkets and freebies; journalists who are highly paid to speak to groups they will later cover; ethical conflicts within the journalistic profession over undercover reporting; entrapment; anonymous sources; checkbook journalism; the tabloids' influence on "legitimate" media; and a list of stories over the last 10 years I call the "Slide Into Sleaze."

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The Slide Into Sleaze

A timetable of stories that gradually led "respectable" media, both print and broadcast, into tabloid territory:

	Beginning in 1992, ongoing stories about marital infidelity by members of the British royal family.
	The Amy Fisher story. In early 1993, all three networks produced documentaries or docu-dramas after the New York teen-ager was convicted of shooting the wife of her lover.
	The arrest of Lorena Bobbitt in June, 1993, made common in mainstream media the previously-censored word "penis."
	In late 1993, the attack on Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan by the ex-husband/manager of competitor Tonya Harding.
	The 1994 trial of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, which included testimony about movie stars listed in her "black book."
	The arrest of football star O. J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife in 1994, and Simpson’s 1995 trial.
	The 1995 expulsion of U.S. Senator Robert Packwood for sexually harassing female staff members. Stories included the titillating details from Packwood’s diary.
	The death of Princess Diana in August, 1997.
	Detailed news stories of sexual allegations against Bill Clinton, so prevalent in 1998 that some columnists suggested warnings: "The following contains content not suitable for children."

Rush to Judgment

The speed at which sensational coverage can destroy the target of a media feeding frenzy is accelerating geometrically.

In 1997, after an outbreak of food poisoning that received massive media coverage, the company that had supplied hamburger to Burger King was out of business in two weeks.

It took about 18 months for the Watergate investigation to reach the point where the news media were suggesting the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

Within 48 hours after the Monica Lewinsky story broke in 1998, two major networks ran special reports strongly suggesting this story would result in Clinton’s impeachment or resignation.

The concepts of what ethical journalists should publish or broadcast, and how personally intrusive they should be, is constantly changing.

In addition to competition and profit, many of those changes are driven by the media’s relative immunity from lawsuits when they write about public figures.

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This chapter continues with journalists' views of letting you preview a story about you; ways to issue a statement that can't be edited; asking for reporters' questions before the interview; reporters and political activity; and whether journalists should volunteer for service in charitable organizations. It ends with the complete text of the current Codes of Ethics for the Society of Professional Journalists and the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

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