Please answer question #3 under The Paper on page 165 of our text. Your response is due by Sunday, Sept. 12, by 9 a.m.
Should we talk about this Monday?
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/09/09/when-a-fringe-figure-becomes-news?hp
Teaching Notes
You must become the flame on the candle. - Thich Nhat Hanh
Monday, September 6, 2010
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Is Media Ethics Education DOA?
It sounds like a joke Jay Leno would tell during his opening monologue on The Tonight Show. Hear about the graduate students at the prestigious journalism school? They got caught cheating on an ethics exam. Ha ha ha. Except that’s actually what happened at Columbia University
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
No one admitted cheating despite pressure from the school’s administrators and pleas from classmates, who feared the scandal would damage the market value of their degrees. Meanwhile, the teacher of the course, New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman, refused to comment. But if the disgruntled posts on RateMyProfessors.com are any indication, his students hadn’t exactly been soaking up knowledge. “Maybe he could e-mail his ‘speeches’ to the students instead of making everyone suffer through the most wasted class in j-school. . . ,” one read.
There’s an old cowboy saying that goes, “When your horse dies, get off.” Journalism ethics education is a dead horse. Or else those aren’t vultures circling in the sky.
A Question for Socrates
The question of how ethics is learned, or even if it can be, is as old as Western philosophy. In Plato’s dialog Meno the title character asks, “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice; or if neither by teaching nor practice, then whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?” Of course, Socrates, being Socrates, resists giving a definite answer. But we can’t. The sad fact is, students had better get an effective ethics education now or they may never.
Last summer I conducted an ethics workshop for some reporters and editors at the Poughkeepsie Journal, a small daily in upstate
But what I remember most is the air of defeat that clung to the staff as we sat on hard plastic chairs in the break room discussing the cases. I could hear in their voices the bitterness and cynicism of employees forced to follow corporate policies they despised. Recently, for example, the paper had started running display ads on the front page and section fronts, a much more grievous ethical lapse, their mumbled asides suggested, than anything the case studies might have to offer.
I don’t want my students to ever wear the gray, defeated expression I saw that day on the faces at the Journal. But given the downward direction in which the media are moving, and fast, how in the world can I prevent it from happening?
Teaching Media Ethics by Telling Stories
A friend of mine who teaches at a big Midwestern university recounts in class the events of her first week as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune. She was sent to Duluth to cover Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey on the campaign trail. When they were introduced, Humphrey vigorously shook her hand. “Oh yes, Susan,” he said, “I read your stuff all the time.” He couldn’t have read her stuff, though; she hadn’t written anything yet. “Just a few words,” she explains to her students, “but words that taught this fledging reporter a great lesson about pols and the little lies they tell.”
I usually find occasion during the semester to quote I. F. Stone’s dictum, “Every government is run by liars and thieves, and nothing they say should be believed,” to make the same point. But Susan’s story makes the point better. That’s because it has existential force. Her story vividly captures in a way a secondhand quote can’t the realities of a reporter’s life.
Some might think telling “war stories” is a waste of precious class time. I’ve a colleague who didn’t want to fall into the “trap” of regaling students with stories ad nauseam (“which, let’s face it, is easier than teaching or grading,” he said). So one semester he kept track. When he toted it all up at the end, he was surprised that he’d used less than an hour - out of 45 – talking about his newspaper experiences. And yet, he admitted, it was his stories that students seemed to remember most.
“Stories teach us how to live,” Daniel Taylor said in his essay, “The Ethical Implications of Storytelling.” What he meant was that stories preserve our experience for contemplation and evaluation. Although not all stories carry a heavy message, there’s an entire category of stories, so-called “exemplary tales,” that are told to convey a moral.
Our war stories are potentially just such tales. They can provide evidence, in ethicist John Barton’s words, of “how real human beings live through various crises and trials and remain human.” My colleague who kept tabs on his storytelling has described his stories as cautionary. Most, he said, deal with “screwups I learned from.”
But sometimes the storyteller and the audience can’t agree on what exactly the moral of a story is.
When Susan was a cub reporter on the Tribune, she interviewed the Beatles, who were on their second tour of the States. She got into their hotel room by dressing up as a waitress in an ugly, mustard-colored uniform and accompanying an actual room service waiter upstairs. Ringo took one look at her little plastic name tag – it read “Donna Brown” – and snorted, “What kind of name is that?” The waiter nudged her in the side. “Tell them what you real name is,” he urged. She did, as well as her reason for being there. Rather than throw her out, the Beatles politely answered her questions. They even let her phone for a photographer. The next day her story ran on the front page, with a photo of John sitting at a table and looking up at her and laughing as she poured coffee in his cup. She still has a glossy print of that photo somewhere.
Many of Susan’s students think she’s nuts for not having the photo hanging up in her office. They also think she’s nuts for saying she’d never participate in the same kind of stunt today. To her celebrity-struck students, disguising herself as a hotel waitress to get an interview with the Beatles seems soooo cool. They lose all sight of the fact that it wasn’t a story of vital public interest that demanded undercover methods.
Susan intends one lesson when she talks about her hard day’s night, but her students, living in a paparazzi-saturated culture, draw another. “It may be a lost cause,” she remarked to me.
Or maybe not. Negotiations over what the point of a story is can be part of the point of the story. In the process of negotiating, we test different interpretations, try out different themes. This is helpful. This is educational. Lawrence Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist famous for his research on the stages of moral development, contended that “the teaching of virtue is the asking of questions. . . not the giving of answers.” Stories don’t necessarily have to yield clear moral rules to be of value. It’s enough sometimes if they just give us something to think about.
18 comments:
I would have to disagree with Alicia and say that the Sun should as honest as possible in news writing. Even though it is a tabloid and tabloids are known for exaggerations and gossip columns, tabloids should be as honest as possible in their writing. As a news publication, their main focus should not be to entertain and make profit; their main responsibility is to educate their audience through facts. Regardless of the type of media, whether it’s print, TV, of web journalism, all journalists should take the ethical oath to be 100% truthful when serving the public.
I believe an informal trust of loyalty and honesty exists between the journalist and his/her audience and this trust should not be broken. The public trusts the journalist to educate us with the truth and the journalist is encouraging the public to act, whether it’s spreading the news through word-of-mouth, without twisting the journalist’s words, or taking a step further. The news media should always be accurate when revealing information to the public because the information can move the public to act – misleading information can create a ruckus and cause harm.
Journalism’s initial purpose was to expose the injustices and cover-ups of the government by revealing the truth and educating the public and the virtue of honesty should continue.
I would have to disagree with Alicia. Tabloids are known for their less-than-truthful stories and blatant lies, but I don't think there should be publications with such untruthful stories. Just because the tabloids are "known for inaccuracies" I don't think it is fair to just excuse them from all standards of truthfulness. I don't understand how they even stay in print when there are so many inaccuracies in what they say. I believe that all journalists should be bound by the same ethical standards. If what's written is inaccurate enough, it can be considered libel and there should be repercussions for blatantly lying and publishing it, easy as that. I don't understand why it is okay for a publication to be so untruthful and it doesn't matter, yet if any other professional publication wrote the same thing, they would be scrutinized over and over. I suppose it makes sense because tabloids have such a bad reputation that it is universally accepted that they will be inaccurate. I still believe that journalists have a duty to be more truthful than that, though.
I agree with Alicia because of the fact that tabloids are, at least in my opinion, more entertainment magazines than an actual news medium. Most articles in tabloids are created off of hunches and paparazzi photos and are read for the hilarious commentary, I don't think that any of what is read in those magazines should be taken as truth. There's a big difference between news publications like the New York Times and the National Enquirer. While I do believe that they should be held to the same ethical standards, they're just not the same thing. The same goes for most blogs on the internet. While they should be writing truthful and ethical material, a lot of times this is not the case. Take Perez Hilton for example. His blog is one of the most popular sites on the internet right now, and the majority of his popularity comes from doodling over the paparazzi photos he obtains. I don't believe any of the material he publishes should be considered newsworthy, or ethical, but there are tons of people out there who read his website more often than an actual news paper. I think the real problem here isn't the fact that these tabloids are publishing less than truthful information, but the fact that the a good portion of the public would rather read those articles than the researched, truthful stories because they'd rather be entertained than thought-provoked.
So to sum this up, yes I do believe all news mediums should be held to the same ethical standards, but i do not believe publications like tabloids should be considered to have 100% non-fiction articles, or therefore an accurate news medium.
I believe that if something is going to call itself a newspaper, it must follow a certain amount of guidelines. One of the guidelines being accuracy and truthfulness. However, when it comes to magazines, it is important to differentiate between what is news-worthy and strictly for entertainment purposes. So for Alicia to say that the Sun does not have to be as accurate as other papers because it is a tabloid, readers must then read with the implication that whatever they obtain might not be true, or truth may be stretched. This is where it becomes more entertainment-based than news-based. Unfortunately, especially today, people are very interested in entertainment tabloids and ideas rather than what's truly going on in the world. Almost as an escape from the truth. So yes, I agree with Alicia in the fact that if she truly believes she is a part of a tabloid, then she can understand if it is not taken seriously or has high importance in the regards of journalism.
I agree with Alicia’s statement. I do believe that there are different standards of truthfulness for different forms of media. Types of media that are known as a source for entertainment versus information should not be held to the same standards that the informative sources are. TMZ, SNL and The Soup aren’t and shouldn’t be held to the same standards as Dateline, Sixty Minutes and CNN News Room. However, I do believe that there should be some truth to their statements; it’s most definitely a gray area. Like we talked about in class, there are levels of truth in the communications world – advertising, public relations and journalism. It is important to realize the difference between a blatant lie and an embellishment of the truth, which is what tabloids are known for.
if standards of truth vary from medium to medium, is the public that consume the media capable or educated enough to make the appropriate adjustments?
It's an unfortunate thing but tabloids, entertainment magazines and such don't report on the same level of truth as newspapers do. I don't agree with this but it's widely accepted. I wouldn't say Alicia's correct when she says the Sun doesn't have to be as accurate as other papers because it’s a tabloid, but that's generally the case. I for one don't watch The Soup, but I'm sure they're a lot of people who do. I do watch the Daily Show though, and I think most people are capable and educated enough to make the adjustments. But that's not to say if they misquote something or tell a white lie I'll be able to easily distinguish it from other factual information. I think one should watch the show understanding it's something you should go to bed with after watching or reading the news from a credible source during the day, and use it as a comedic reflection to the top stories. But far too many people don't pay attention to the credible news and solely watch entertainment ones, and that's where I think problems can arise. There's nothing worse than a misinformed and misguided public.
I believe that Alicia is wrong when she says that the Sun doesn’t have to be as accurate of a newspaper because it is a tabloid. As a reporter, it is her initial responsibility to search and present the public with news that is credible and accurate so they can make conscious decisions about their life. If we were to allow or even accept the fact that tabloid newspapers presented less credible information to the public there would be no point of reading it because it would not benefit the public in anyway. Tabloid newspapers are profit driven and the editors would be willing to publish anything that would create greater revenue. Therefore we must hold all reporters and journalist (no matter the medium) to one standard of truthfulness and accuracy in order to keep the news honest and fabrication free. If we continue to allow different mediums to have varying levels of accuracy in their news stories, the public will continue to be feed misinformation causing them to make irrational decisions. `
I feel that the news industry as a whole should put out accurate stories meant to inform and educate the public; publications have a duty to tell the public the truth. However, tabloids are a different breed of news than something like the New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle. In my opinion, they are a means more of entertainment than of actual news. Alicia saying that the Sun is held to different standards, therefore, is understandable, even if it does make me angry.
Tabloids and news media, like Perez Hilton or The Colbert Report (of which I am a fan,) are typically taken with a grain of salt, and are often more funny than serious or accurate. It says a lot about the sad state of both the media and the public when publications like the National Enquirer or Globe are read more widely than professional newspapers or magazines.
Tabloids, perhaps, should be held to standards of their own -- standards that imply exaggeration and sometimes, stories that are half-fiction. Its difficult to decided whether or not I agree with Alicia, because, while I understand that tabloids are mostly absurd, I realize that some people do not. But then again, if every news medium was held to the same standards, there would probably be no tabloids.
Fox News advertises itself as "fair and accurate." A lot of people watch it. Do they think it's fair and accurate? Or do they watch it for laughs? If they take Fox seriously, does Fox have an ethical obligation to actually be fair and accurate rather than just say they are? Does the same logic hold for tabloids -- or any other supposed news outlet?
Achieving epistemic responsibility should be the purpose of all newspapers whether their focus is national politics or untouchable celebrities. While news about your favorite reality TV star should be insignificant in comparison to news about budget cuts affecting your public higher education, we must recognize that both stories are being published by different news media that claim to be reliable sources.
Like Zan stated above, if a publication is going to call themselves a newspaper, being truthful and accurate should be a common goal. Therefore, I disagree with Alicia. I think that it is the Sun’s responsibility to publish truthfulness despite their tabloid label.
Even though the popularity of celebrity gossip is unfortunate, I think reading different tabloids and recognizing it for its entertainment purposes is a privilege not shared by everybody. I think that some people can open a magazine and laugh it, while others are negatively affected by it. For that reason, I don’t think it should be the public’s responsibility to make any adjustments because the damage done is too major. Alicia’s implication supports and contributes to the already unethical, unnecessary and inaccurate purpose and image of tabloids. Instead of contributing to that purpose, journalists should be working on maintaining socially responsible media outlets.
If you are printing something that people are going to read, and you don’t label it as fiction, you are ethically bound to tell the truth as you know it. That can be tricky, because sometimes the full truth doesn’t come out until after something is said or published. In this case, Alicia is wrong. People read tabloids and, in many cases, take them to be fact. To knowingly publish a false story is wrong because it will be read, and believed, by many. True, people know that tabloids tend to print stories that aren’t entirely true, but that doesn’t mean that others won’t believe them. I think that, if you are going to pass something off as true, it has to be true. If you have a disclaimer that explains how not all elements of the story are fact, you are fine. if you claim to be printing the truth but aren’t, it’s unethical. The medium doesn’t matter: TV, print, Web, etc. Don’t pass it off as news if it isn’t.
Even though tabloids are different form of media than a newspaper they should still contain news if they are going to be presented that way. Since, most of the time, they are not labeled as fiction so it is morally wrong for them to be doing so. However, we have adapted to this tabloid culture in which everyone agrees that these papers are not trust-worthy and solely entertainment. Therefore, because it is expected, lies and fabrications in this news format are more acceptable than fox news misusing and airing old images and videos.
We have a standard for each form of medium in our minds that can be adjusted quickly based on the content of it. So, Americans pick up a tabloid expecting half-truths but turn on the news or read a paper expecting not to be lied to, even though this is not always the case. Gradually, Americans as a whole, will not be able to tell to difference between the two but right now there is still an acceptable line to be drawn.
I agree with Alicia’s statement somewhat. There are different levels of truth for every publication and it is the responsibility of the readers/viewers to understand the medium from which they're consuming, whether it is CNN or the Post, or even something like the Onion, a satire website posing to be a news organization. Truth depends on the context something is ingrained in, which depends on the credibility and reputation of the news organization reporting the facts.
Many "tabloid" web news-sites such as TMZ, or even clip-show news programs like John Stewart or the Colbert Report can never be held to the same standard of truth as a major news corporation because they are out simply to provide entertainment, not fact or thoughtful emotional viewpoints for anyone. While they can by no means provide false or inaccurate information, they have more leeway than traditional hard-news outlets in their reporting. As we discussed in class, there are different levels to truth in the business as a whole, with advertising being the least truthful, than public relations, than journalism. The recognition between lies and embellishments of the truth is an important factor when consuming reports from less credible venues, and one must take everything with a grain of salt, it is on the public who is usually either too indignant or too media illiterate to make the distinction.
I believe Alicia is incorrect in implying that the Sun doesn't have to be as accurate as other papers because it's a tabloid. While there is to a degree a public perception of tabloids being trash or unreliable sources of information, it is a journalist's and paper's job to report on the facts and that all journalists, regardless of medium, should be bound by the same ethical standards.
The reason I think all journalists should be bound by the same ethical standards is because I believe all sources of news information available to the public should have equal reliability. If only a section of journalists follow these standards, it renders the others most likely as misinformation. When traditional print is struggling and online content is becoming more and more readily available, it's of the utmost importance that they share ethical standards so that the public does not lose factual sources of information. If these standards aren't followed, what you get is essentially fictional work in terms of news.
Only 14 of the 25 students in our class responded to the blog post. Of course, I am disappointed, but you are all adults and presumably know what you're doing and why you're doing it.
See you tomorrow. Should I come prepared? This isn't a rhetorical question. According to one ethical principle, the Brass Rule, we should do unto others as they have done unto us. This is quite different from the idealism of the Golden Rule and, as a result, carries far different implications for our social conduct.
I know this won't be accepted, I figured I'd do it anyway. To be honest, I thought today was Saturday. This break has really discombobulated me. I'm really, really sorry.
Alicia is a self-interested fame-hungry editor-monster who is probably wrong about everything up until she has to get shot in the leg to realize it. Ok, she's not really THAT bad. But in a sense, she is right. Of course there are different standards of accuracy for tabloids, but that doesn't mean there should be. It also doesn't mean that anybody out reading these tabloids knows they're tabloids, or that the standards are in fact, different. It's not like the paper says in the top left corner "TABLOID". Further, there's no disclaimer saying "The Sun holds no responsibility for falsities printed in our paper." And they probably should be saying that too, because masses of people read tabloids because masses of people like sensational news. They don't care about the truth, they read what they want to read and believe whatever they're fed. They need a little guidance, a little disclaimer. The only reason I say there are of course different standards is because when you pick up a tabloid, ridiculous things are posted in them. A lot of the time, they're untrue. They don't source very well, they are sensationalist and obnoxious. That's what they are. But they certainly shouldn't be.
Every type of publication should be bound by the same ethical standards, and those standards should be to obtain as much information possible from legitimate sources, source them, and truly believe your information is correct. The gray area is deadline and timing. Online publications can publish so fast, so what they really have to worry about is if they are taking enough time to get the full, true story before they post. Competition, as the text said, is tempting, and even more so for web. So web publications have to consider that. I don't think that web content, however, should be held to lesser ethical standards just because they can change the information quickly and easily. That, I feel, encourages sloppiness. But when it comes to print, it's different. You cannot knowingly print something that is not true. As the text says, journalists are necessary for the health of democracy, writing the first draft of history. The last thing we want is ill leadership and history books marked by error.
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