by David Carr, editor, Twin Cities Reader
Newsworthy 1995

I was watching the movie "Nell," in which the idyllic existence of a beautiful wild child is threatened by an evil, unthinking newsie who stumbles upon her. Her doctor/protector implores the journalist to show some compassion, or absent that, a bit of ethical consideration. My wife leaned over and asked me what I would choose.

I didn't admit it at the time, but I would indeed choose to tell Nell's story: telling stories is what I do. I would step up to Nell in the belief that I was somehow uniquely qualified to tell her story with understanding and in context. Of course, Geraldo Rivera probably begins every assignment with exactly the same feeling in his gut.

There are reasonable people who believe that asking a journalist about his ethics is like asking a shark about his conscience: neither species thinks about much beyond attacking and ingesting its target. And that belief may run a bit deeper when it comes to the alternative press, which is one of the guiltiest parties in the so-called "journalism of aggression" that characterizes our time.

Alternative weeklies were conceived in rancor three decades ago and continue to thrive on a diet of skepticism about institutions and the people who run them. We are "aginners"; subjects do not generally show up on the cover of theTwin Cities Reader for a journalistic buss on the cheek.

While I don't buy into Janet Malcolm's journalist-as-whore paradigm, just between you, me and Connie Chung, I admit that there are times when my membership in the Fourth Estate doesn't leave me feeling like a paragon of rectitude.

We journalists, like other business people, make all sorts of compromises in pursuit of professional objectives. We know how to make and observe a verbal contract, but how we represent ourselves and our stories falls into a gray area. For instance, if we are working on a story and it becomes clear that one of our subjects has become a target, should we let him or her know that the story we are working on isn't a friendly one?

Conversely, if we go after the big bad guy and find a more complicated, conflicted picture than the public recognizes, does the story we publish give him more dimension than big and bad?

Although we hew to the same reporting and information-gathering standards as the conventional press, we do not feign objectivity when we write the story. The tone of our news coverage is often rife with judgment. I believe our approach is intellectually more honest than the main-stream media's myth that they are just reporting THE TRUTH and nothing more.

Every media organization has an angle and an agenda. Mainstream media have mastered the illusion of challenging the powers that be even as they perpetuate the status quo in more substantive ways. In 1994, the daily papers and television news departments covered important issues like the public buyout of Target Center and dry cask nuclear storage at Prairie Island by defining the stories narrowly enough so the conclusions were inescapable. They let the opposition rant and rave, but the cant - prioritizing and packaging of stories at critical points in the debate - made it clear that there was an agenda beyond the facts of the story.

I think part of the reason our profession ranks lower than a snake's belly in public opinion polls is that people do not buy the canard that we simply report the news. They have noted that we move in packs, tend to feed on the same carcass and reach the same conclusions. The masses who bemoan our lack of objectivity are right - we cling to that concept not because it's true, but because it allows us to throw lightning bolts without acknowledging that we have any personal interest.

I think we would do better with our readers if we more closely identified with them, not in some sort of facile "Your News" sense, but as mortals who walk the same path. They don't want faux objectivity. They want common sense and a reasonable expectation that all points of view will be considered.

I became editor of theTwin Cities Reader 18 months ago. After 15 years as a reporter, I was surprised to learn that ethics occupies a significant portion of the editor's desk. We are deciders. Publish C.J.'s salary? In a heartbeat. Pursue a story about the rumored sexual proclivities of a candidate? No thanks. It's a common-sense personal principle at work here: I'm okay with my salary being published, but I don't want anybody lifting my blankets. Seems simple enough to me.

But even when things get more complicated - and they do - I believe a formal canon of ethics would not be very useful because the decisions we make are episodic, situational and filled with the kind of relativism that makes drawing clear conclusions almost impossible. We must often injure one constituency (sources or subjects) in order to serve the needs of another (readers). I don't think a code of ethics could encompass or predict the decisions we need to make on a daily basis.

That said, we are far more expert at getting and publishing information than we are at deciding whether it is ethically appropriate to do so. For instance, during the campaign last fall we heard that Julie Quist, wife of right-wing candidate Alan Quist, had once had an abortion. As an editorial organization, we believe that abortion is a private matter between a woman and a doctor. Period. Except our competition looked into the story and found that Quist herself had written about her abortion, thereby making it a legitimate component of the election debate. I was comfortable with our ethical demeanor, even though we got beat, and I would hope that when ethics and news values are in conflict at the Twin Cities Reader, that ethics have a fighting chance.

In an article in the December 12 edition of The New Yorker that was so full of truth it's difficult to pick a single quote, Adam Gopnik argues that "...journalism is not a profession. It has no standards of admittance, no board of review. Though an argument can be made that the normal rules of compassion, decency and fairmindedness can be suspended for practitioners of certain professions at certain moments, no such argument can be made for journalists. The morality of being a reporter is really about the same as the morality of being a person."

I couldn't agree more. Time and again I have stepped up to ethical conundrums with little more than the common sense my mother drilled into me and come away unscathed (you'd have to ask our subjects if they have been so lucky). Suggesting that journalists imitate human beings is one way we might confront confounding ethical issues. Like any human, we will make mistakes, but I remain unconvinced that I would do better if I had a uniform code of ethics at my disposal. I think that if we consistently observe human standards of decency as opposed to codified professional imperatives, it will lead to journalism people can feel comfortable relying on.