by Jeremy Iggers
Newsworthy 1995

We can think of everything that gets written or said as part of a great conversation that takes place, not in a vacuum, but in the context of institutions - newspapers, television stations, universities - and informal settings, like the neighborhood cafe. Each institution has its own rules for conversation. The conversation gets shaped by the interests of the institutions and the participants, and by those with power.

Codes of ethics are part of the journalist's conversation. They reflect the often conflicting interests of the people who draft and adopt them. They are, in short, political documents. Institutional interests determine how ethical principles will be translated into rules of conduct, how those rules will be enforced, and what acts will be seen as violations of the rules.

That's what makes journalism ethics so problematic. It is quite possible to be a very ethical journalist and still to produce journalism that is utterly irresponsible or destructive. You could say that journalism's codes of ethics provide a convenient defense of the indefensible: it is much easier to stay within the guidelines of the codes - especially if you have the power to interpret and enforce them - than it is to fulfill the civic responsibilities of the press.

The irony of this may explain the cynicism journalists feel about their own profession: their perception that there is a profound contradiction between the mission of the press - to provide citizens with the information they need to play an active role in democratic life - and the journalism they practice, which systematically compromises values of public service in favor of other interests.

It may also explain why many in the public feel "journalism ethics" is a contradiction in terms: they see that the rules journalists invoke to justify their conduct instead undermine their mission to serve the public interest.

The Janet Cooke Case

Understanding this may help explain how one high-profile case of ethical misconduct - the Janet Cooke case - became the textbook example of unethical journalism. In 1981 the Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for Cooke's dramatic news story, "Jimmy's World," about the life of an eight-year-old drug addict. Jimmy turned out to be a fictional composite character, the Post returned the prize, and Cooke resigned in disgrace.

Yet compare Cooke's sin with that of Kurt Lohbeck, a former "CBS News" stringer in Afghanistan. In the Columbia Journalism Review (January/February 1990), reporter Mary Ellen Walsh offered evidence that Lohbeck falsified reports, staged battle scenes, and worked as a publicist for the Mujahidin. Lohbeck's fictions continued much longer than Cooke's, reached a larger audience and were more substantially false, distorting the larger picture. In theory, the Lohbeck case ought to rank among the great journalistic scandals of our time, yet it remains little known.

The Cooke case is an egregious example of someone who violated the fundamental rules of journalism; however, if we look at those fundamental rules, they turn out to be very troublesome.

The Rules

Conflict of Interest: The injunction to avoid conflicts of interest means that a reporter must maintain independence from sources. In reality, however, news-gathering involves an inextricable inter-dependence between reporters and sources. Reporters must cultivate sources and are keenly aware that future access to information depends on how they handle today's story. Sources, in turn, cultivate reporters. The most valuable gifts that reporters and sources can exchange - scoops and favorable coverage - simply aren't recognized as gifts. And somehow, the rules about conflict of interest seem to apply only to journalists, never to publishers or parent corporations.

Accuracy: Journalists are supposed to strive for accuracy, but accuracy has an ambiguous relationship to truth. For example, a report quoting a Pentagon spokesperson on the number of casualties in an invasion can simultaneously be an accurate report of what the spokesperson said, but an inaccurate representation of what actually happened.

Objectivity: Objectivity supposedly eliminates personal prejudice and separates fact from value and interpretation. This assumes that only facts remain; it doesn't acknowledge unconscious, cultural or institutional biases, or sources' biases.

Fairness: Is it fair to report the arrest or indictment of a person accused but not yet found guilty of a crime? That is illegal in some countries because it may damage an innocent person wrongly accused. Does fairness require treating all competing viewpoints as equally valid? Does fairness extend to all? In practice it stops at the U.S. border. The right of Castro or Ghadafi or Hussein to a balanced airing of their perspectives is rarely acknowledged, except, perhaps, in a token paragraph whose credibility suffers from the context within which it appears.

Sensationalism: Journalists are supposed to avoid sensationalism, but sensationalism is built into the concept of news. Events are seen as newsworthy because they deviate from the ordinary, and good reporting is seen as presenting events in an emotionally compelling way.

Given these fundamental conflicts and ambiguities within the core concepts of ethics codes, how the rules get applied to particular cases often depends upon whose interests are at stake.

Defining Truth

It may be helpful to view the Cooke case as the flashpoint of an enormous power struggle within journalism over the power to define truth.

This struggle came along with other challenges to the established journalistic order: the emergence of the alternative press, which challenged official accounts of the Vietnam war, and the work of journalist-storytellers like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, who ventured into worlds whose truths could be revealed only by abandoning the stance of objectivity. These developments undermined traditional journalism's claims not only to professional superiority, but also to moral authority.

The New Journalism of truth-telling over fact-telling threatened the old, but it was a very difficult threat to confront head-on. Enter Cooke: her transgressions became the pretext for a counter-revolution in American journalism, a reassertion of authority, a banishing of the New Journalism, a new fundamentalism of facts.

The Responsibility of the Press

In the wake of the Cooke affair there has been a lot more talk about journalism ethics and several efforts to revise codes. But there is little evidence that the press has become more successful in fulfilling its most basic social responsibilities.

The most fundamental responsibility of the press is to enable the public to participate in democratic life. It has generally been assumed that the way the press does that is by providing information. However, the press is failing miserably to produce an informed citizenry. Numerous surveys of public knowledge show that most Americans cannot name their congressional representative and cannot identify the country on the southern border of the United States. Enabling the public to participate in democratic life may require more than information.

Christopher Lasch, in the Gannett Center Journal, suggests that ignorance results from news consumers' no longer perceiving themselves as having a meaningful role in the political process. Lasch thinks democracy needs public debate, not information. Participation creates the citizen the media are supposed to inform.

This conception of the social role of the news media calls for a different set of professional principles - principles that emphasize not transmission of information, but rather creation and sustenance of public participation. It calls for some new values to be articulated. In addition to the values of accuracy and fairness and the injunction to avoid sensationalism and conflict of interests, I would add an obligation to fully disclose interests, as well as the following larger principles:

Diversity and Accessibility: Democracy is equated with the widest possible participation of citizens in public life. Thus, a basic professional commitment should be made to diversity and accessibility, not only in terms of race, gender and class, but also in viewpoints and ways of life.

Civility and citizenship: Civility - respect for persons - makes civic life possible. The media play a central role in modeling citizenship and conflict resolution. Since the media have traditionally placed a priority on dramatically charged images of conflict and confrontation, there has been little representation of how peace-making, reconciliation and compromise are achieved. If citizens have little idea of how to participate in public life, it may be because the traditional criteria of newsworthiness have rendered grassroots participation invisible.

Deliberation and Dialogue: Truly democratic action reflects the public will, but the public will comes into existence only through public dialogue and deliberation. Whether there was an earthquake in Azerbaijan is not open to interpretation, or of much immediate consequence to most Americans; by contrast, whether the U.S. should give large-scale foreign aid to the states that made up the former Soviet Union is far more important and controversial. It is the responsibility of journalists to identify issues on which the public must make hard choices, and to frame those issues in a way that creates the possibility of productive deliberation.

The media can serve as a forum for dialogue, not simply between individuals, but also between communities within a larger society. This suggests a redefinition of what counts as newsworthy. Among other things, it places greater emphasis on the bulletin-board function of the paper: more space would be needed to announce meetings.

It is unrealistic to expect that, on a corporate level, media outlets will make changes that interfere with profit-making. However, fostering citizenship may turn out to be an effective way of generating subscriptions or audiences. The decline in newspaper readership has many causes; one may be a decline in citizenship as a public value. Subscribing to a newspaper was traditionally motivated, in part, by a sense of civic duty to be informed. If consumers no longer feel that duty, it may be because newspapers no longer address them as citizens.

Ultimately, this change in values means acknowledging that the news media are central organs of public life, constructors of our shared reality. To pretend that they are only observers and chroniclers does not alter that fact, but merely evades the responsibilities that go along with that power. Rather than strive for detachment, journalists must assume that responsibility and strive to become what Wichita Eagle editor Davis (Buzz) Merritt, Jr. calls, "a fair-minded participant in a community that works as a community."

Jeremy Iggers writes an ethics column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and is the author of Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics & the Public Interest