Journalism Ethics and Issues

Blogging presentation now online

2008-04-14T15:50:00.001-04:00

I've posted the PowerPoint to my presentation on the ethics of blogging, both here and in the course documents at right. You may find it useful in dealing with your final exam.

Your grades thus far

2008-04-10T10:50:00.002-04:00

I have posted all of your grades to this point on Blackboard. Since Monday is our last class, this would be a good time to check everything and make sure it matches up with where you think you're at. I will confess to having occasionally misrecorded a grade, so make sure you take a look.

Prepping for Thursday's class II

2008-04-08T09:55:00.005-04:00

Paul Levy has provided me with a list of posts that he would like us to read in advance of our class on Thursday. Please do him the courtesy of reading these and coming prepared with questions and comments.

"Descending into Xenophobia," March 14
"Compensation for Directors of Non-profits," March 5
"Thank You, Senators!", March 3
"Query on National Health Care Legislation," March 2
"The Mutating Playbook," Feb. 21

They're all pretty short, which suggests that he know more about how to write a blog than I do.

Prepping for Thursday's class

2008-04-07T14:34:00.002-04:00

This coming Thursday I'll do what I hope will be a brief presentation on New York Times blogger/critic Virginia Heffernan and her controversial post on Ron Paul's possible ties to neo-Nazi and white-supremacist groups. I would like to move to a discussion after that. So please make sure you catch up on the reading for this week.

Also, our final guest speaker of the semester will be Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the author of the blog Running a Hospital. Levy will discuss the ethical minefields he encounters as a newsmaker who now has a way of communicating unfiltered with the public rather than exclusively through the news media. Please familiarize yourself with his blog and what he's been writing about over the past few weeks.

Richard Chacón assignment

2008-04-03T12:55:00.002-04:00

Just to put this into writing — your assignment is to write a 700-word news story in which you will cover former Boston Globe ombudsman Richard Chacón's talk. You will also incorporate two pieces of outside reading to give your story context and depth. Stories from the reading list are fine. Use normal journalistic attribution, i.e., "As Mary Smith wrote in the American Journalism Review in March 1992 ..."

Deadline: Monday, April 7, at the beginning of class.

I have also posted today's slideshow here, and under "Course documents."

Civic journalism slides posted

2008-03-31T10:18:00.001-04:00

I've posted the PowerPoint presentation on civic journalism here. You'll also find it under "Course documents," at right.

"A Hidden Life" online

2008-03-26T10:53:00.002-04:00

If you were unable to join us in class on Monday, please watch the "Frontline" documentary "A Hidden Life," which is online here. We will continue our discussion of it for about another half-hour tomorrow. Specifically, I want to go a little deeper on the issues of undercover reporting and the outing of closeted gay men and lesbians.

Former ombudsman to speak

2008-03-24T16:52:00.002-04:00

Our guest speaker on Thursday, April 3, will be Richard Chacón, former ombudsman for the Boston Globe. Several of Chacón's columns are included in the reading for next week.

I'm flagging this now because I want to stress how important it is that you attend. Your last major writing assignment, other than the take-home final, will be to cover Chacón's talk and write a news story based on what he tells us, as well as some other information that you will gather.

"Religion in the News"

2008-03-24T16:42:00.002-04:00

I want to call your attention to a panel discussion that will be held next Wednesday, April 2. Titled "Religion in the News: What Future Reporters and Editors Need to Know," the discussion will take place in the Ballroom at the Curry Student Center from 11:45 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. This would make a good extra-credit assignment. Panelists will be:

Benjamin Hubbard, chair emeritus of comparative religion at California State University, Fullerton.
Debra Mason, executive director of the Religion Newswriters Association and director of the Center for Religion, the Professions and the Public at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Munir Shaikh, executive director of the California-based Institute on Religion and Civic Values.

The moderator will be Prof. Stephen Burgard, director of our School of Journalism and author of "Hallowed Ground: Rediscovering Our Spiritual Roots."

Should you choose to cover this as an extra-credit assignment, please write a 600- to 700-word news story in which you quote at least three people. Since there are three panelists, that ought to be easy. Stories will be due at the beginning of class the following Monday, April 7.

Tom Fiedler, Gary Hart and political sex

2008-03-20T10:05:00.002-04:00

Our guest speaker today will be Tom Fiedler, retired executive editor of the Miami Herald, who led the Herald's coverage of Gary Hart and Donna Rice in 1987. I could not have imagined how appropriate the timing would be when I asked Fiedler to speak: We are now being deluged with political sex scandals, from former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, to current New York governor David Paterson, to new revelations about former New Jersey governor James McGreevey.

There are three relevant pieces of reading for today's discussion:

Joan Vennochi's op-ed column in today's Boston Globe, in which she interviews Fiedler about the Paterson matter and under what circumstances the media ought to pry into the sex lives of politicians.
The American Heritage summary of the Gary Hart drama that I shared with you on Monday.
A longer piece published by the Miami Herald on May 10, 1987, that details the stake-out that led to Hart's being confronted. (Actually, this seems to be the top of a still longer article.)

I'll give you a chance to read Vennochi's column in class. Please be prepared to have a dialogue with Fiedler. The public rightly has high expectations when it comes to the personal behavior of our political leaders. On the other hand, there's a serious case to be made that it's nobody's business as long as public money isn't being spent.

Then again, the question of whether public money was involved is an issue with all three of the current gubernatorial sex scandals.

Media bias presentation now online

2008-03-16T21:49:00.002-04:00

I've added last week's PowerPoint on media bias to the course documents at right.

Extra-credit assignment — correction

2008-03-16T20:54:00.001-04:00

The deadline is Thursday, March 20. See below. My apologies.

Extra-credit assignment

2008-03-13T09:15:00.003-04:00

If you would like to boost your grade a bit, here's something you can do about it. I also think you'll find this to be an interesting assignment. To cap off our discussion of media bias, I would like you to write a 600- to 700-word essay (the length of an op-ed column) on a mainstream news organization and whether you think its news coverage is biased.

Please cite three examples of this organization's news coverage to bolster your case. I'm specifying news coverage because I don't want you to cite a columnist or an editorial as an example. Offer your argument, and explain why you have come to the conclusion you've reached.

You can conclude that the news org you're looking at is biased or not biased. For example, the Fox News Channel is widely viewed as tilting conservative, and the New York Times to the left. Maybe you disagree and can come up with three instances to show why.

If you choose to do this assignment, and I hope you will, it will be due at the beginning of class next Thursday, March 13 20. You do not need to give me copies of your examples — your essay alone will be sufficient.

Looking for media bias

2008-03-10T09:11:00.003-04:00

For this Thursday, I have a brief assignment for you. Please find an example of media bias in a newspaper, magazine, Web site or radio or television program. Write two or three paragraphs on why your example demonstrates bias, and whether you think that bias leans toward the liberal or the conservative end. Staple it to the clip of your story.

If it's a broadcast story, you need to give me a copy of the transcript (from LexisNexis, perhaps?) or a URL so that I can watch or listen myself.

This will count toward your class grade.

Jeff Jacoby on media bias

2008-03-09T19:37:00.004-04:00

This coming Thursday we'll hear from Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby on the subject of liberal media bias. As preparation for Jacoby's appearance, I would like you to read three of his columns. They are:

"The Media's Anti-Gun Bias," Jan. 17, 2000
"Yes, Virginia, There Is (Still) a Liberal Media Bias," Dec. 12, 2002
"Iraq's Good News Chronicle," Sept. 22, 2005

I'm really looking forward to having Jacoby speak to us, and I hope you are, too. Please come ready with questions.

Clash of media cultures

2008-02-29T08:40:00.002-05:00

Take a look at this story and photo in the New York Times. The photograph, taken by Reuters, shows a Palestinian infant who was killed in a rocket attack being buried. It's tragic, but it's also an illustration of clashing media cultures. In the Arab world, images of death are routine. In the United States, they are unusual. Yet the Times, by publishing such an image, finds itself straddling both cultures.

Photojournalism ethics

2008-02-27T13:50:00.004-05:00

For Thursday's class, please make sure you've done the reading for Week 8. I have some news in that regard. The university is in the process of moving the server on which our Syllabus and Online Reading List are located. You will now find it here. This is supposedly being done for security purposes, and it is not anything over which I have any control.

I also found that Dana Milbank's Washington Post story was no longer where it was when I put the list together. I've discovered a new link, and it should work just fine.

Attribution and citation

2008-02-24T20:08:00.004-05:00

Almost the same thing. But not quite. I've gotten enough questions about this that I want to go over it one more time before you hand in your research papers on Thursday. This is a formal research paper — it's not a news story, and it's not a personal essay, although I know that a few of you are writing about a personal experience you've had.

The confusion that seems to arise is when you want to quote someone who was interviewed in an article. For instance, let's say Montana Republican-Democrat editor Melanie Cooper is quoted in an article in the American Journalism Review as saying the following: "Ever since the Stephen Glass scandal, we've made it a policy to run photos with any story where there might be questions about whether the people we portray actually exist."

Now, hold that thought. At the end of your paper you will include a bibliography that will list your primary and secondary sources. One of those sources will be the article in which Cooper's quote originally appeared. Your citation — keeping in mind that this is a fictional example — should look something like this:

Stevens, Peter. "After Glass, Editors Seek New Tools for Credibility." American Journalism Review, May/June 2004. http://www.ajr.org/credibility.html

(I'd do a hanging indent, but I don't know how in Blogger.)

All right, then. Let's return to your paper. Here's a paragraph that you might write:

Aficionados of the movie "Shattered Glass" may recall the moment when the office secretary tells New Republic editor Charles Lane that Glass never would have been able to get away with as much as he did if the magazine ran photographs with its stories. Sure enough, that's exactly what Melanie Cooper, editor of the Montana Republican-Democrat, is doing. "Ever since the Stephen Glass scandal, we've made it a policy to run photos with any story where there might be questions about whether the people we portray actually exist," Cooper said (Stevens).

As you can see, the paragraph contains both an attribution, to Cooper, and a citation, to Stevens. And we know what you mean by "Stevens" because, when we turn to the bibliography, we see the full citation for his article in the AJR.

You may use traditional footnoting if you wish, but in-text citations seem to be the way most research papers are formatted these days. As I have told you, I am not hung up on format; but I insist on thoroughness.

Some of you who have more experience writing research papers may wonder why I do not italicize the titles of magazines and newspapers (and books and movies). The reason is simple: I'm trying to follow AP style as much as possible. As you know (or as you should know), there are no italics in AP style. This is a holdover from the days when teletype machines literally couldn't transmit italic type. Even though that has long since ceased to be the case, AP style still hasn't caught up.

Because this is not a newswriting course, I will not mind if you choose to follow the more formal style of using italics for magazine, newspaper, book, television-show and movie titles. But please try to be consistent.

The New York Times' McCain story

2008-02-22T17:37:00.003-05:00

We'll be devoting our entire class on Monday to the New York Times story on John McCain, which suggests, on the basis of suspicions voiced by two anonymous sources, that McCain may have had a sexual affair with a lobbyist during the 2000 presidential campaign.

There are three pieces that you need to read for Monday's class. Please print them out, make notes on them and bring them to class. Here they are, with links:

The Times story
A Washington Post story on the same subject, but handled very differently
A New Republic article giving the background on the Times story

There may be other materials, including (I'm sure) some video. But we'll deal with that in class. I do not want to take the time for everyone to read these three articles. Please come prepared and ready to talk.

We'll deal with the ethics of photojournalism next Thursday.

What would you do?

2008-02-19T14:28:00.002-05:00

Roger Darrigrand, a photographer for The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, poses a dilemma. If you're taking pictures and someone gets hurt, should you keep shooting? Or should you drop your cameras and help out? Please read how he answered that question. We'll talk about it a bit at the beginning of class on Thursday.

Tweaks to our schedule

2008-02-16T09:49:00.003-05:00

If you're one of those students who likes to print out the syllabus and carry it around for the rest of the semester, then I want to let you know that you should do it again. I have made a few tweaks to reflect some changes in our schedule.

The most important is that your 750-word news story is now due on April 7 rather than April 3. This is to accommodate the fact that former Boston Globe ombudsman Richard Chacón will be our guest speaker on April 3. It makes sense that it is he whom you would make the subject of that story.

Media-concentration slides

2008-02-11T14:20:00.000-05:00

You can download my PowerPoint presentation on media concentration by clicking here. I've also added it to the course documents, at right. I didn't get all the way through my presentation today, so I'll give it another go on Thursday. The I.S. people tell me that they thought we were in 39 Snell rather than 31, and thus couldn't find us.

Please make sure you are caught up in your reading by Thursday. I would like to try a classroom exercise during the last half-hour or so.

Guest speaker on Thursday

2008-02-05T13:13:00.000-05:00

We will have the first in our series of guest speakers on Thursday. Callie Crossley, a former producer for the ABC news magazine "20/20" and a well-known television commentator, will join us during the latter part of the class to talk about the media and the run-up to the war in Iraq. In the first part of the class, I'll lead a discussion of the Danny Schechter documentary "WMD."

Research-paper guidelines

2008-02-05T12:46:00.000-05:00

I've posted them here. You'll also find them in the course documents, at right, and I'll hand out hard copies in class on Thursday.

Thoughts on the Mitch Albom paper

2008-02-05T11:23:00.000-05:00

I'll be passing back your graded papers tomorrow. For the most part, they were quite good. Grades would have been slightly higher if more of you had simply followed the assignment guidelines. In particular, I encountered repeated problems with insufficient and nonexistent citations. As I said in the assignment:

Strictly speaking, this is not a research paper, but neither is it an essay that you can write off the top of your head. I want you to do your homework on this. Be sure to cite all sources; the citation format is unimportant, but transparency and thoroughness are essential.

I also ran into a few problems with misspelled proper names, and with some of you citing only one code of ethics when I had specified two. (It would have been especially nice if more than a few of you had discovered the full text of the Detroit Free Press' code rather than relying solely on SPJ and ASNE.) Let's keep these things in mind as we move forward with the research paper, which will count for 30 percent of your grade.

Two issues regarding Mitch Albom's conduct came up over and over in your papers. Though there are no right or wrong answers to some of these ethical dilemmas, there are a couple of questions that I'd like you to think about.

1. Was Albom's column of April 3, 2005, an isolated incident? Many of you said that it was, which is why you decided to temper justice with mercy. Yet you will note that the Free Press' internal investigation revealed that there were other times when Albom wrote about games and news conferences as if he were there when he was not.

I was particularly struck by the Chicago Bears-Detroit Lions game that he "covered" by watching television. One of his editors suggested that Albom make it clear in his column that he was not actually at the stadium, and then noticed, after publication, that Albom had failed to take him up on that suggestion. The editor apparently did nothing, which speaks to extent of Albom's celebrity big-footing in the Free Press newsroom.

I would also suggest that if the two basketball players had done Albom the favor of actually showing up at the Saturday game, no one ever would have been the wiser.

2. Did Albom plagiarize? Here we get into an area in which I have to side more with Albom than with his critics. The Free Press has a strict rule that all quotes not gathered by its reporters must be attributed to the original source. That is an excellent rule. But it also goes against the customary practice at many news organizations.

Albom said his own rule is that quotations that were essentially already out there in the public domain do not need to be attributed. To the extent that Albom actually succeeded in following that rule, I think most journalists would agree he was acting ethically. As long as a reader would not reasonably believe that Albom himself had interviewed the person being quoted, then it's not plagiarism.

That's not to say it's good practice — as we know, it's prohibited at the Free Press. And there are times when sloppiness could lead a journalist not to cite a quote that should be cited. But "plagiarism" is probably too strong a term for what we're talking about here.

A final note: On many of your papers, I've corrected you for writing that Albom's offending column was published on April 2 rather than April 3. I later noticed that LexisNexis incorrectly stamped the publication date of Albom's column as being April 2. That probably reflects the fact that it moved out over the wires on April 2 for publication on April 3. In any case, this had no effect whatsoever on your grades. But it shows that it helps to check everything.

More on "WMD"

2008-02-04T14:05:00.000-05:00

We'll have a discussion about some of the issues raised by Danny Schechter's documentary "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception" in class on Thursday, and possibly on Monday as well. (We're scheduled to have a guest speaker for part of our class on Thursday, so we may have to cut our "WMD" discussion short.)

Remember, if you were not in class today, you will be expected to find another way to see "WMD." The entire film is online here.

Although I think there's much of value in "WMD," there's no question that it's told from a certain point of view. Please be prepared to talk about whether you think the film is biased, and why. In particular, you were probably struck by the claims that the U.S. military may have deliberately fired on the media center at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. The Committee to Protect Journalists investigated that claim, and found it had no basis in fact. Here is an excerpt:

A Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) investigation into the incident — based on interviews with about a dozen reporters who were at the scene, including two embedded journalists who monitored the military radio traffic before and after the shelling occurred — suggests that attack on the journalists, while not deliberate, was avoidable. CPJ has learned that Pentagon officials, as well as commanders on the ground in Baghdad, knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of international journalists and were intent on not hitting it.

However, these senior officers apparently failed to convey their concern to the tank commander who fired on the hotel.

If you read the entire report, you will see that Jules Crittenden, an embedded reporter for the Boston Herald, had direct knowledge that the military had come under attack from rocket-propelled grenades, and that U.S. troops were attempting to take out a forward observer.

Since the tank commander apparently did not know that the Palestine Hotel was the headquarters for journalists, the result was a tragic accident.

Post-class links

2008-01-31T14:02:00.001-05:00

As we discussed in class today, the New York Times has a front-page story on some questionable dealings involving Bill Clinton, a uranium-mining mogul and the dictator of Kazakhstan. Should the Times have held the story until after Super Tuesday? Or did it have an obligation to run it now? Is it even a story, given that it's Hillary Clinton, not her husband, who is running for president?

In 2003, former New Republic staffer David Plotz wrote about the odd experience of seeing his life — not to mention is wife — depicted in "Shattered Glass."

And, yes, your one-page memo is due on Thursday, Feb. 7. I've corrected the assignment sheet, which you'll find under "Course Documents."

Your research-paper memo

2008-01-30T12:16:00.000-05:00

I've posted the guidelines for your research-paper memo, which is due next Thursday, Feb. 4, at the beginning of class. I'll hand out hard copies of the guidelines in class tomorrow, and we'll take a little time to discuss it.

Caucusing over ethics

2008-01-29T13:31:00.000-05:00

Now this is interesting. We know that journalists should stay away from political activism. But we also know that it's all right to vote. (Although Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. famously thinks otherwise.) But there's a gray area, and Denver Post editor Greg Moore (left; former managing editor of the Boston Globe, by the way) is trying to deal with it.

Moore wants to limit and discourage Post staff members from participating in the Feb. 5 Colorado caucuses without banning it completely. (Although certain categories of employees, most prominently those who cover politics, will be banned.) The theory: caucuses are not like primaries. You vote publicly, in front of other people, and therefore identify yourself as partisan.

In a memo to the staff, Moore writes:

I am trying my best to be sensitive to individual rights while at the same time protecting the credibility of the paper and our ability to continue to cover politics as best and as fair as possible.

I'd like to spend a few moments talking about this at the beginning of class on Thursday, so please follow the link and read Moore's memo.

Update: At the Denver Post's competitor, the Rocky Mountain News, editor John Temple just says no.

Assignment for Thursday

2008-01-29T12:21:00.001-05:00

I had a request to upload a copy of the assignment that is due this Thursday. So here you go. It's in MS Word format. I'll add it to the Class Documents in the right-hand column as well.

Politicians, the press and the truth

2008-01-28T10:22:00.001-05:00

Here is the video we discussed in class of presidential candidate Mitt Romney mixing it up with Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson:

As we saw, Rachel Sklar couldn't get a word in edgewise on MSNBC. Well, you'll find her commentary critical of Johnson at the Huffington Post.

Interestingly enough, John McCain, renowned for his "straight talk," has now been credibly accused of telling a knowing untruth — in English, we call that "lying" — about Romney. The AP published a story the other day that Minneapolis Star-Tribune headlined "Romney didn't say what McCain says he said on withdrawing from Iraq."

And so it goes.

The All (Britney) Press

2008-01-14T09:35:00.000-05:00

The Associated Press, principally known for being a serious news-provider and the last redoubt of the inverted pyramid, is going all Britney, all the time. The New York Times reports:

"Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal," Frank Baker, the Los Angeles assistant bureau chief, wrote on Tuesday morning, three days after Ms. Spears was released from the hospital where she had been admitted in the wake of a custody dispute.

No one is saying that the AP is going to drop its traditional news coverage. But Baker's memo certainly speaks to misplaced priorities.

You also have to wonder whether this approach will work. When the AP competes with the likes of TMZ.com and PerezHilton.com, it's putting itself in a battle it's likely to lose.

Looking ahead

2008-01-11T16:14:00.000-05:00

Next week we'll consider codes of ethics at news organizations and how they apply to real-world situations. See the online reading list. And please don't forget to continue with "The Elements of Journalism."

Looking back

2008-01-11T16:08:00.000-05:00

We had such a good discussion going in class on Thursday that I never got a chance to hand out a couple of stories that I thought could serve as further fodder. Washington Post media reporter wrote a comprehensive roundup on the media's performance in New Hampshire for the paper's online edition. And, at Poynter.org, Butch Ward tells the media something they should have known in the first place: "Cover, Don't Predict."

When journalists become ad vehicles

2007-12-26T10:39:00.001-05:00

There's a story in today's New York Times that's shocking — or at least it would be shocking if similar things hadn't already happened repeatedly over the past decade. On New Year's Eve, journalists for the ABC affiliate in New York City will be enlisted in an advertising campaign for Ritz crackers. I've written about this on my blog Media Nation, where you'll find a link to the Times story.

Welcome to Ethics and Issues

2007-12-22T09:55:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the class blog for Ethics and Issues. This will be my primary method of communicating with you during the semester about readings, assignments, guest speakers and the like. Please visit this page often or, even better, subscribe to it with an RSS newsreader such as Google Reader.