Teaching Notes
You must become the flame on the candle. - Thich Nhat Hanh
Sunday, March 31, 2013
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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.
1 comment:
One particular instance in my academic career that I can remember when I had to implore moral courage was when I worked on a particular story in my Journalism 2 class. It was election season, and the class had to each give a story topic. Some of the topics ranged in subject from how students were influenced to vote a certain way to why certain students don't think it's important to vote at all. I was given one of the more difficult topics to cover: why certain towns in the Ulster County area had sponsored less to the Presidential election in 2012 than they were in 2008. This was a doable project, but a time-consuming one, because it required that I speak to elected officials in and outside the area. It required research on open secrets.com and other sites that logged data and translate that data into an article that people would be interested to read. Other classmates' workload consisted of roaming-reporter-style questioning, while mine was a lot more in-depth. I felt like I had been given the short end of the stick with this assignment.
I tried, though, but after reaching several dead ends, outdated town websites and unanswered phone calls and emails, I stopped trying. The deadline was creeping closer and closer, and my fellow classmates already had their stories written. I didn't want to talk to my professor about it because I didn't want him to be disappointed in me. I felt that he was assigning me this story because he knew I could do it, but I couldn't figure out how to even start. I decided not to try at all. I don't really know what made me decide that no work was the best work, but I got frustrated and, after a while, lazy, and didn't want to continue with the story. I was also upset that I was given such a more difficult story topic than everyone else.
The deadline passed and I didn't hand in my article. I would shrink in my chair whenever my professor mentioned the story, and asked if anyone hadn't submitted theirs yet.
After class, I complained to one of my friends, a fellow Oracle editor, about the story I was given. She's one of the best reporters I know and I always look to her for journalistic advice. Her words were short but powerful: you can do it. I don't know why something so cliche, coming from a friend, meant so much to me, but in that moment, I believed I could do it too. I didn't care that it was past the deadline, I wanted to get this story in.
I frantically called elected officials in the area and did extensive online research, managing to pull the story together in a little over a day. Even though I submitted it almost two weeks late, it was graded decently, and I realized it wasn't so difficult after all.
I guess my moral dilemma in this situation was actually doing the story. Once I got started, it turned out not to be as scary as I thought, but I just needed that little push. I could have continued to let the days pass me by (and I did), I could have complained that my topic was more difficult than the other ones (and I did), I could have lied and said sources weren't getting back to me (and I did), and I could've just decided not to hand it in at all. But I did, and I did pretty well, considering it was put together in a day.
If Veronica Guerin were in my situation, she would have taken the bull by the horns and done the story, no questions asked. I don't think she would have pitied herself for as long as I did (or at all, for that matter) about the relative difficulty of her story. She would have dug deep to find out the real reasons why towns weren't invested enough in their candidates to financially support them anymore.
Reading about her makes me feel like less of a journalist, because of the situations she's been in versus the situations I've been in. Having to consider not writing an entire story that has the potential to be put together in under 24 hours (and I would know because I did just that), was stupid in hindsight. Not every story is fair or easy, but they're all worth telling.
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