PressEthic

I started my first newspaper career as the editor of a little, 5,000 circulation weekly 30 miles outside of New Orleans. With a staff of three, I was as green as they come and working in the middle of nowhere. I had never thought of ethics. I was just glad to have a real job, and I was the editor. I loved that title, but I was about to learn what came with it: responsibility.

Ann, my managing editor, whose parents owned the paper, seemed nice, but she was very, very religious. Living in the South for sometime, I was accustomed to working with people with strong faiths; it was part of the territory.

Little was I to know what a problem her faith might pose.

As I was busy learning the ropes, one day, I overheard Ann from my cubicle in a heated discussion over the phone. She explained to me that the Cox Communications spokesperson, the PR man from the local cable company, was livid over an article she had written last week.

She covered a rally in which some local women protested Cox’s decision removing two religious channels from the basic package to the more expensive digital one.

Foolishly, I had never read the article before we went to press, as I was too busy basking in seeing my name in print to worry about her story.

Scared by him, Ann asked me to call the Cox spokesperson. During the conversation, he screamed at me over the phone, as I fumbled and stammered, telling him I needed to read the article before I could reply. So, better late than never, I read the piece.

Aghast, this is how the article began:

Viewers around the country protest obscene programing on basic cable

From chilling violence, to explicit language, to near pornographic sex, pretty much anything goes

Several programs currently on basic cable television should be considered pornography, according to the Parents Television Council, yet they are part of the general basic programming offered by Cox Cable. We will not go over the details here, but explicit examples of obscene programming currently being aired on MTV, Fox FX, and other basic cable stations can be reviewed on the web site www.parentstv.org.

Not merely satisfied with writing an inflammatory article, it turned out that Ann knew the protestors, drove them to the rally, was helping with the petition and then made them pose for the picture. But she got caught on the surveillance camera, that's what enraged the spokesperson, saying that what she had done was completely unethical. Unbelievably, she could not understand what the people from Cox were so upset about.

As the editor, I realized it was up to me to eat crow from the guy at Cox, as I had to call him back and apologize. After which, I found myself delicately telling my superior that what she had written was not an article but an editorial and that could not stage an event. What else was I to do? I couldn’t fire her. I told her from now on that she should put ideas like this in her Christian-theme column, where she espoused a Pat Robertson-esque ideology.

Luckily for me, she agreed. The reason that I say this is a famous Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

She could have said no. Then what would I have done? I would like to believe I would have walked out, but who knows?