| Chapter 6
Journalism
Ethics
By
David Krajicek
Breaking Laws
As a young crime reporter, I had a niggling sense of failure because
I could not bring myself to steal furtive glances at the documents
that lay on a detective's desk during interviews. I had heard the
old saw so many times as a student: The best thing a journalism
program can teach a young reporter is how to read upside-down.
The upside-down aphorism still is trotted out frequently, but it
gets less funny with each new revelation about ethics gaffes during
reporting. Two examples reaffirm that journalists should not break
laws while reporting a story, no matter how important or competitive
the pursuit.
- A Cincinnati newspaper reporter who gained illegal access
to telephone messages used the material in his multi-part investigation
of a corporation. When the ethical lapse came to light, the reporter
was fired, the newspaper apologized, and his good investigative
work was ruined, even though most of his reporting had nothing to
do with the ethical lapse.
- A Minneapolis television reporter took a videotape from
an unlocked car at the scene of a pit bull dogfight raid. The tape,
which showed dogs fighting, was shown on news broadcasts then handed
it over to police. Under criticism, the reporter defended the action
as "aggressive reporting" and said the tape had been in
as "in plain view," as though the law enforcement protocol
concerning legal searches and seizures applied to journalists. His
news director said, "Reporters are under a lot of pressure
and often move in gray areas for good or bad purposes. I think the
intention here was very good-minded." Facing three criminal
charges that could have resulted in a jail sentence, the reporter
finally admitted he had made a mistake.
The case illustrates a number of criticisms against the media:
reticence to admit a mistake; a myopia that deems nothing can be
wrong if done in the process of gathering news, and a self-regarding
point of view that places a journalist's good work before all other
considerations.
On the other hand, Mike Hoyt of the Columbia Journalism Review
points out that informant Daniel Ellsberg surely broke laws when
he secretly copied 7,000 pages of "Pentagon Papers" documents
that he made available to Neil Sheehan of the New York Times.
Hoyt wrote, "Journalists have often crossed certain ethical
boundaries in pursuit of stories that they judged worth the trip.
But where is the line in the sand? Secretly listening to corporate
voice mail is certainly an unusual piece of enterprise. The big
mess in Cincinnati gives us reason to think about just what should
be our guiding lights when we make these means-and-ends calculations."
Who Counts?
Why is the disappearance of one child front-page news while another
missing-kid case is an inside-the-section local story? Why is a
gang homicide treated like a fender-bender while a tourist murder
gets the overturned school bus treatment?
Danielle van Dam was snatched from her San Diego bedroom on Feb.
1, 2002. Alexis Patterson vanished on the way to school in Milwaukee
on May 3, 2002.
Each girl was 7 years old. They disappeared months apart in big
cities.
But the van Dam case became national news while the Patterson
disappearance was relegated to local interest.
The San Diego girl was white and middle-class, the Milwaukee girl
black and poor.
Melvin Mencher, the retired j-school professor, calls selection
"the heart of journalistic practice." He writes, "In
their reporting and editing, journalists are always making choices:
what to report, whom to interview, what to put in the story, what
to leave out. Selection…is guided by values that reflect prevailing
concerns and the value system of society and the individual."
The issue of selection is an evergreen topic on the Criminal Justice
Journalists discussion list.
As one newspaper reporter put it recently, "How do you justify
to your readers the amount of coverage a murder victim receives?"
He described two murders: a white man who beat his sleeping, pregnant
wife to death with a metal bat, and a black man stabbed to death
during a drug deal.
The first got 40 inches, the second 5.
The reporter asked, "Are we obligated to report all murders
equally, or at least try to? Should we pound the pavement when we
know that the victim was a druggie who didn't pay his dealer on
time? Or, as reporters, should we filter out the uninteresting,
routine shootings, stabbings etc. to make room for the unique stories
that surprise and shock us"?
Another reporter responded, "My editors have concluded that
our readers aren't really interested in what they call ‘misdemeanor
murders' or even ‘dirtball murders.'"
A third weighed in that drug murders are "run-of-the-mill
homicides" while the killing of a pregnant woman by her husband
was a "compelling story." That reporter catalogued other
"interesting reads": a random killing; an "overly
heinous" domestic crime, an elderly woman who commits murder-suicide
with her ailing husband; a child killed by a train; a hit-and-run
fatal accident of newlyweds, a teenage couple killed in a petty
robbery.
Another journalism adage may be appropriate to the discussion:
Assume nothing.
Edna Buchanan, the legendary Miami Herald crime snoop, made
a career of finding the unusual in the seemingly routine. She argues
in her memoir that there is no such thing as a "dirtball"
murder. Every murder conceals a story.
Jimmy Breslin, the New York newspaper columnist, likes to say that
reporting is "climbing steps and knocking on doors." He
earned his reputation as a young reporter by doing so at places
where other journalists didn't bother. Inside those doors, he often
found fabulous stories about "routine" cases.
In a recent post on the CJJ discussion list, Melissa Moore, police
reporter with The Advocate of Baton Rouge, La., encouraged
journalists to pay attention to "misdemeanor murders."
Moore wrote, "Keep an eye out for clearance rates, conviction
rates, evidence suppression hearings, etc. I suspect (with no data
to back it up) that these are the cases where wrongful convictions
are the most likely, given that the suspect is almost always a career
criminal and everyone, from the media to the cops to the courts,
is not paying close attention."
Frederic Tulsky and Ted Rohrlich of The Los Angeles Times
conducted just such an investigation in 1996. They found that of
the 9,442 homicides in Los Angeles County from 1990 to 1994, only
half were "solved" by arrest and just one-third led to
convictions for murder or manslaughter.
Using careful quantification, they concluded the killers of whites
were more likely to be punished than killers of blacks or Latinos;
slayings of blacks and Latinos were less likely to be solved; killings
of whites were more likely to be publicized by the media, and high-profile
media cases were more likely to be treated severely by prosecutors.
The Tulsky-Rohrlich series, published in December 1996, was a Pulitzer
Prize finalist.
One often-repeated journalism definition regards news as "the
unusual." But in terms of crime, if the reason behind a statistical
run-up lies in drug or gang murders, don't those cases deserve out
attention?
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