PressEthic

On the subject of journalistic integrity, I found an article of interest in The New York Times Op-Ed section this Sunday, in "The Public Editor," a column by Byron Calame. The article is entitled, "Hazarding Personal Opinions in Public Can Be Hazardous for Journalists." The NPR defines the public editor as the “in-house journalism critic."

The piece discusses the recent ethical questions raised by a speech given four months ago by Linda Greenhouse, who has worked as a New York Times Supreme Court reporter for 28 years. Greenhouse gave an acceptance speech at Harvard University for the Radcliffe Institute Medal. Until NPR broadcast a few key quotes from it, the speech was completely under the radar. Here's the problem: Greenhouse's speech made a few definitive statements expressing her opinions about the policies of the Bush administration.

The NPR article reads:

"'Greenhouse went on to charge that since then, the U.S. government had 'turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world -- [such as] the U.S. Congress.' She also observed a 'sustained assault on women's reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism. To say that these last few years have been dispiriting is an understatement.'"

As well, The New York Times article included a later quote:

“She later added, ‘I feel a growing obligation to reach out across the ridiculous actual barrier that we seem about to build on the Mexican border. ...’”

The questions that Calame’s column raises are:

How do top editors at the Times interpret and enforce the policy when a star reporter is involved? And what is the value of such an ethical standard, given that journalists are human and have personal opinions?

The New York Times's ethical guidelines say that a reporter should not express opinions in radio or on TV that they would not be allowed to say in the paper, presumably because the paper purports to be objective and as unbiased as possible. If reporters are running around writing books like Bernie Goldberg’s, it would be difficult for readers to trust that they are getting an unbiased perspective on, say, political coverage from that reporter.

In a Supreme Court story, as the column says, Greenhouse could not include the quotes that the NPR reported without someone else saying them – they are opinion, not “statements of fact,” which is how Greenhouse characterized them to Calame.

Greenhouse doesn’t have a history of unbiased reporting, but when she and other Times reporters participated in an abortion march seventeen years ago, on the same day that a story by Greenhouse on abortion was run, she faced trouble from her editor. According to both The New York Times and NPR, Greenhouse was reprimanded and apologized, because reporters for the Times are not allowed to participate in something that public and political.

The Times' public editor (Calame) made the argument that the ethical guidelines are there for a reason – maybe Greenhouse is experienced enough to keep bias out of her reporting, but a less experienced and able journalist might need explicit guidelines to ensure that they avoid writing with bias - biased writing and reporting reflects negatively on both the reporter and the paper. The more reporters appear in public and take political, moral, and religious stances, the less the reader can trust them to be objective, especially if that reporter is writing on the very topics that reporter is expressing their opinion about in public.

The Times’ former public editor, Daniel Okren, was less disapproving. He called for a re-evaluation of the ethical guidelines for journalisms – not necessarily to revise them, but because of the fine line between restricting a journalist’s personal freedoms to express their opinions like any other American citizen.

What do you think? When Janny Scott, a New York Times reporter, came to our Writing 1 class to speak a few weeks ago, she was reluctant to criticize the management of the paper or express her opinion on how the government and newspapers responded to 9/11. She asked repeatedly, “Are we on the record?” Presumably, this is because Scott was giving a speech – could that be considered a public speech? Since we quoted Scott in our articles on the speech Scott had no idea whether we intended to write stories on her speech or not, it might fall under the Times’ guidelines that Scott keep her mouth shut about her opinions on the Bush administration and the Times’ management.

The New York Times' executive editor send an email to the current public editor, clarifying the Times' ethical policy to include "speaking in public." The New York Times needs to be more specific in their ethical guidelines about what constitutes “speaking in public.” Is that phrase actually in the Times' ethical guidelines? Are we citizens first and journalists second? Do we have a responsibility, as military and government officials do, to keep quiet on our own personal views in order to preserve the integrity of our employer and of our work? Or should newspapers be less binding than those institutions? Should journalists hide who they are and what they believe in? What constitutes a public place or a public speech? It’s a blurry line between opinion and fact, as we’ve seen from the countless blogs on media bias. Should Greenhouse face repercussions so as to increase the communities trust in reporters? At the very least, the ethical guidelines for journalists with regards to expressing their opinions on the radio, on television, in a book, or in a ‘public speech’ need to be more clearly and explicitly defined.