Can compromise create an environment where freedom can thrive?
In reviewing for a unit on media literacy for my online ethics class, I found this in the “Elements of Journalism” by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel:
“A newspaper that fails to reflect its community deeply will not succeed,” the authors quote Jack Fuller, president of the Tribune Publishing Company. “But a newspaper that does not challenge its community’s values and preconceptions will lose respect for failing to provide the honesty and leadership that newspapers are expected to offer.”
That started me thinking about how scholastic media reflect their communities (and which communities there are to reflect) and what responsibility is involved.
That led to several other questions:
• What do journalism educators see as the responsibilities of scholastic media?
• What do student journalists see as their responsibilities in scholastic media?
• What do administrators see as the responsibilities of scholastic media?
• What happens if the parties define responsibility differently?
• Are these responsibilities absolute or is there room for compromise?
• What does compromise mean?
• Does how we define compromise make a difference?
• Who decides?
If developing – or maintaining – an educational atmosphere supportive of freedom of expression is important, we really must answer those questions.
As I try to form workable answers, more questions arise:
• Should compromise include legal issues?
• Should compromise include ethical issues?
• Should compromise occur on substantive beliefs?
• What happens if one or both parties decide compromise does not solve the issue?
Since most major approaches to problem solving include compromise, these are serious questions in need of a process that provides answers.
Rushworth Kidder in chapter 8 of “How Good People Make Tough Choices,” Kovach and Rosenstiel in “Elements of Journalism” and Randy Swikle in the McCormick Foundation’s “Protocol for Free and Responsible Student News Media” all address the need for compromise in reaching ethical solutions to issues. Each approach provides insight into problem solving.
The next step, if we are going to truly derail the prior review and censorship express, is to create models of theories that work. We have the groundwork for understanding, so now it’s time to model a process of creating constructive and ethics-based solutions now handled by prior review and/or restraint. To do so, we must also answer the inherent questions so all parties are willing to participate.
Can we agree to create an environment where freedom can survive?
Read MoreSo say we all
Rushworth M. Kidder, founder of the Institute for Global Ethics, highlights an ethical process called the Potter Box in his book, How Good People Make Tough Choices.
This process, first discussed by Ralph B. Potter in 1965, suggests four steps decision-makers should consider before making policy or taking action:
• Consider the situation
• Determine what values are involved
• Examine the relevant principles at stake
• Determine where loyalties lie.
While applying the concept of the Potter Box might not be new, it could aid scholastic media in its decision making before publication or broadcast. Working in concert with Rethinking News values, discussed here Nov. 16, the Potter Box offers students a chance to evaluate principles and values in context with loyalties. Such a process could well preclude administrative or other outside interference.
What, for example, could happen when the principle and value of telling the truth comes into conflict with being loyal to a school or administration that might not see the value of discussing controversial topics like homosexuality or gay marriage.
Kidder says in his book that the Potter Box, while useful as a guide to thinking and focusing decision-making, does not fulfill several other ethical principles such as using the Golden Rule, or Kant’s categorical imperative.
“It allows for a reiteration of ideas through several cycles of discussion,” Kidder writes, “in hopes that a consensus will eventually form around a particular action or policy.”
Such pre-publication discussions could lead to consideration of alternative approaches and outcomes. It might help student media anticipate before they act and plan their approaches to get the most complete, most balanced story, even if the topic is controversial.
And that would be good.
Read MoreRethinking news values
We all emphasize the aspect of news values in our journalism programs: timeliness, conflict, consequence, proximity and more.
Perhaps it is also time to update those values with a list of ethical news values for our scholastic media programs.
The original news values, for the most part, say authors Philip Patterson and Lee Wilkins in their text, “Media Ethics,” do not help students decide how to report news ethically.
The authors suggest the following concepts, excellent for starting a healthy discussion of how scholastic media might encompass rethinking, revitalizing and repurposing multi-platform reporting.
• Accuracy: Using the correct facts and the right words and putting things in context. Journalists need to be as independent as they can when framing stories.
• Tenacity: Knowing when a story is important enough to require additional effort, both personal and institutional. Tenacity drives journalists to provide all the depth they can.
• Dignity: Leaving the subject of a story as much self-respect as possible. Dignity values each person regardless of the story or the role the individual plays.
• Reciprocity: Treating others as you wish to be treated. Reciprocity recognizes that journalists and their viewers and readers are partners in discovering what is important and getting information from that.
• Sufficiency: Allocating adequate resources to important issues. Individually, it can mean thoroughness. Organizationally, it means allocating adequate resources to newsgathering.
• Equity: Seeking justice for all involved in controversial issues and treating all sources and subjects equally. Equity demands all viewpoints be considered but not all framed as equally compelling.
• Community: Valuing social cohesion. It means reporters and editors evaluate stories with an eye first to social good.
• Diversity: Covering all segments of the audience fairly and adequately. Giving all segments a chance to be heard.
After all, within each of these tenets we have beginning points for action plans that could lead to the removal of prior review and restraint and to launch into discussions of truth v. loyalty and other ethically important concepts that could revitalize scholastic journalism.
And those are important plans and discussions we need to have.
Read MoreLooking to meet your needs
Concerns bounced around the JEA listserv this week:
• Who owns the copyright of student media work?
• How to best answer ethical concerns about controversial stories?
• What should a class in editorial leadership contain?
• How do student media handle requests not to picture some students?
Questions like these prompted JEA’s Scholastic Press Rights Commission to address some of these questions and others by planning to create short information pieces on topics like these.
The Commission will begin work on these topics at a retreat in January. In the meantime, we would like to hear from you about what legal and ethical topics you want answers for, directions on or just information about.
As you can see from the examples, not all questions need address strictly legal or ethical concerns.
Help us prepare a set of one-page summaries on topics you feel are important. Post your topic suggestions here as comments.
Read MoreThe power of choosing the right words – and images
Whether it’s news about a tornado that hit New York City recently, the use of mosque in stories about the World trade Center or just how scholastic journalists refer to those they report, choosing the right words, and knowing their various meanings, is just another example of ethical decision making.
Consider these articles as classroom guideposts on content and ethical issues:
• In Six Lessons for Journalists and Consumers in Statue of Liberty Tornado Photo, a Making Sense blog at Poynter, Steve Myers urged journalists to be skeptical when presented with being “scooped.” Points he makes include “Check your source” and “apply a critical eye” because if we don’t “our readers will.”
“It’s hard to pick up on subtext in e-mails,” he writes. “It’s even harder to do so on Twitter, where earnest, nutjob and ironic tweets all look the same — especially to strangers.”
• Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark, in one of his Writing Tools pieces, talks about the language use, in particular the difference between denotation and connotation. Word associations, he quotes himself from The Glamor of Grammar, “The fair choice of words is one of the most important and common challenges in American speech, writing and politics.” Clark stresses that word choices can be loaded even when the reporter does not intend to create an editorial view.
• To tie it all together, teach from this 2005 post by Clark, Red Light, Green Light: A Plea For Balance in Media Ethics.
“Language, we know, reflects reality, but also helps define it,” Clark wrote then. “The words we choose will determine how journalists and the public see the world ethically.”
His words apply today, if not even more so.
The power of words is immense. Let’s learn to empower to our sense of freedom by using words to enlighten and illuminate accurately, not to trivialize or sensationalize.
Read More