Your suspicion would be entirely incorrect with regards to Wallace and Jennings, I assure you. That’s like supposing that someone could get through law school without ever encountering a discussion about the ethics of defending “guilty” clients (or prosecuting laws one may personally find unethical).
No.
But he should then recuse himself from any reporting on the incident.
I never said there was anything wrong with the law. I agree with the law. If inaction causes or contributes to actual criminal activity, then by all means act. There’s nothing criminal or or unethical about the other side fighting back in a war, though.
No and no, but they have no obligation to do either, and neither example has anything to do with reporting.
Why?
Seriously, why?
Because he’s now part of the story.
I’m going to ask for a cite about that one as well.
Apart from the PBS program I mentioned, can you name any symposia or talks or articles where either man addressed the topic of ethics at all? And if so, can you give details about their stands about the issues involved?
It is worth noting that before each man firmed up their position as a newscaster, they held various jobs in broadcasting - Jennings at one time looked to become the Canadian Dick Clark, and Wallace hosted game shows. This isn’t a slam on either man - just an observation that their career paths weren’t such that the introspection that you assume, and that would be there for a lawyer with a defined education and career path, would necessarily be present.
These guys blazed the way in many areas - but trailblazers sometimes aren’t led to introspection or self-criticism. I think this is particularly true of Wallace, who never seemed to want to face some of the uncomfortable consequences of the journalism he mastered, and that others took to new highs and lows.
Cite was provided above. The notion that either Wallace or Jennings would ever have been taught to interfere with a story (or not taught not to) is so wildly implausible as to make a cite request ridiculous. You’re asking for a cite that they somehow managed to go their whole careers without ever being taught or exposed to the most rudimentary journalistic standards. Absurd.
Well, so much for gonzo…
That is also not a cite. You wanna pull this shit? You get it right back.
Cite? A real one. Not your opinion, a cite.
Regards,
Shodan
I think that’s an important point, but why he include a disclaimer about his involvement, and then continue to report. I’d hate to ask a journalist to make the decision between helping a dying person, and losing part of his livelihood.
Perhaps, but You’re the one holding forth in a my-post-is-my-cite manner about how absolute this rudimentary journalistic standard is, yet the reactions of Jennings and Wallace refute this, other posters in this thread who work as journalists refute this, links have been provided to journalism ethics classes and debates that dispute this and so on. You’ve got Wikipedia and your own self proclaimed expertise as the son of a political reporter. Well, my dad’s a doctor, but if I tell you you should drink lye to cure a toothache, I’d get a second opinion if I was you.
What thread have you been reading? No one has refuted me, least of all Wallace and Jennings, whose side I’m defending.
Why is that important?
Here’s the thing. You know and I know that reporters are involved in every story they cover. Just the act of COVERING a story means you’re part of the story. Deciding that an article on homelessness should be presented to the readers means that you’re part of the story.
The problem with journalism is not that journalists do or don’t get involved in the story, it’s that they become involved in the story yet their “objective” stance leads them to hide their involvement in the story. You can write a story from a third person omniscient viewpoint, but that leaves out how you got the story in the first place. How did you get that interview with that homeless guy? Why did that politician call you up and relate that anecdote? Why did that mobster decide that you were trustworthy enough to talk to?
Current newpaper journalistic practice is to pretend that all that doesn’t exist. The messy process of actually creating a story is all hidden from the readers. But you know and I know that politicians give interviews and pass along anecdotes for reasons that seem good to them. Sure, it’s a journalist’s job to evaluate the interests of the people who talk to them, but what is gained by putting that evaulation behind a veil of secrecy? This is how we get day after day of stories with “senior administration officials dismissed the claims of some critics of administration policy”. Why not “Condoleeza Rice called me yesterday and said that Hillary Clinton was a pathological liar”?
A reporter can take the words “I”, “me” and “my” out of the story, but that’s an attempt to confuse the reader. It’s essentially a lie, because it conceals from the reader the process of creating the story, it conceals why that story exists and why it was printed on this particular day. A hypothetical reporter who doesn’t care about outcomes, only the story, wouldn’t even care about the story, because the story is nothing. What good is the story except what the story does in the minds of the readers? If the reporter doesn’t give a shit about homeless people, why are they bothering to write a story about homeless people? What’s the point?
Every story is a political act. Every story is an attempt to influence people. To pretend that the story means nothing and affects nothing means that the story has no reason to exist. Either journalists are advocates, or they should quit.
The fact that they had different responses to the question at all refutes your assertion that doing nothing is one of “the most rudimentary journalistic standards”. It’s not. Wallace bullying Jennings into changing his answer doesn’t change the fact that Jennings gave the correct answer first. The answer is legitimately open for debate, no matter what YOU say. And that’s the whole point.
Jennings initially gave the wrong response. Wallace corrected him and chastized him for it. Jennings accepted the correction and conceded that Wallace was right. I am defending the position that both of them ultimately decided was journalistically correct and, thus far, no one can provide any refutation or counter to the basic premise that reporters are not supposed to interfere with stories.
I’m just checking in here to say that THIS
is spot on in my opinion, regardless of the fact it wasn’t answered in context. I’d argue that a reporter embedded with a military unit on the other side of a conflict has at the very least a serious ethical conundrum on his hands between his duties as a journalist (to objectively present the truth with as little interference as possible) and his duties as a citizen of a country (to not provide aid and comfort to the enemy, even through inaction).
I’d be comfortable with a reporter who was willing to go with Jenning’s first answer: prioritizing saving lives of his countrymen over getting a “good story”–and I’ll bet he gets some GREAT footage, albeit likely posthumous, when he starts running and yelling.
Depending on how you weight the relative importance of “totally objective war reporting in all things” and “duty to fellow citizens (as greater than duty to fellow humans in general)”, you could reasonably disagree. I don’t really ask a reporter to be objective when he could make a difference for the better, I just ask that he stick to facts and not bury stories of importance for reasons of personal opinion–and I think it’s far more likely any reporter in the war hypothetical would bury the story of “ambush on US troops, from the enemy point-of-view” lest he find himself the target of personal vindictiveness when he returns stateside.
I’m going to try to not be rude here, gentlemen. But some of the things I’m reading are the sorts of things my Intro to Newswriting students pop forth with.
Most of all I want to mention (as I do 100 times per semester) is that a reporter, and especially a reporter with a hot story that could have dire consequences, never makes the decision to run a story alone. In fact, the reporter RARELY makes a decision about whether a story runs.
This is what Managing Editors are for, and I don’t see a hell of a lot of mention of such in this thread. It’s not like a reporter walks up to the printing staff and says ‘put this in’…or at least not more than once, anyway.
So all of that sort of story you guys are mentioning are going to pass through many hands and desks prior to running.
Currently I own two particularly political newspapers. And the explosive stuff passes through three hands and a free form discussion before running. It needs to be fair, even if it is hot material.
I’m not saying that this is true of all newsrooms and publications. There are certainly pubs and websites where bias is the order of the day. But, at the same time, it’s pretty damn easy to tell them apart and take them with a grain of salt. The one’s you should be concerned about are the ones where bias is NOT the style of the day that such might creep into.
I don’t get your position (shared by Mr. Dibble) that a closeted homosexual politician gets outed if he works to curtail gay rights, yet doesn’t get outed if he doesn’t. The reason obstensibly being that the first guy is a hypocrite and deserves to be revealed as such. The problem I see is that either one believes that being a homosexual is a bad thing or he doesn’t. If he believes it to be a bad thing I can see him outing either person. That’s consistent. If he doesn’t believe homosexuality to be a bad thing, how can he then use it to hurt someone. That’s got more of a whiff of hypocrisy in it, I’d say. Not to mention more than a minor inconsistency. Either one believes that certain things are private or he doesn’t.
What’s being outed is the hypocrisy, not the homosexuality. You don’t have to think an act is "bad’ to think it’s hypocritical.
Jonathan, what about the british papers, which are biased, but known to be steadily biased? I’d like your opinion on how they’d handle a topic like this.