Adventures in Ethics |
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So what do you do when you are an army of one? When it comes to covering questionable topics, I ask myself these questions:
1. Is it really news?
2. Does it interest the student readers?
3. Is it the responsibility of this publication to be the public watch dog?
Case in point. A few months back there was a shakeup in the administration in the Dubuque Community Schools. One of the school board members called a special meeting to expose the superintendent's "lack of ability to lead effectively." Evidently there was a fire storm brewing in the IT department. The top IT guy had resigned a few months prior, and someone had recently found a very expensive software program($30,000) that had been purchased, but was not being used.
In the end there were special meetings that lasted all of six minutes, with lots of complicated contract rules being followed to oust the superintendent.
I sent student reporters to cover the meetings, but they came back with a little information that they did not understand.
As I watched the local media coverage unfold, I decided that I did not have a reporter qualified to cover this story. I also did not have a timely enough publication (we publish monthly) to cover the story in a timely fashion. And I was concerned that anything that ended up in print (especially inaccuracies) might mess up legal proceedings.
Did I make the right decision? I don't know, but I am sure more opportunities to make ethical decisions will come down the pike. I will have to be the one to make the call then, too.
Paula Wolfe
Dubuque Senior High School
Dubuque, IA
Interesting scenario. I think you probably did make the right call, as much as it likely pained you not to cover this topic in your publication. You also bring to mind one tidbit an administrator told me last year, which is that we have to be careful about how we present the facts in our newspaper articles because, we have to be concerned that people (parents, lawyers) may try to cull this information from our school newspaper as evidence to hold against a district in the case of a lawsuit. (I'm not sure that it's ever actually happened in our district, but apparently, it's happened somewhere.) In our case, one of my staffers thrives in "English class writing" and described the girls "clawing" at each other in a very heated powder puff football game. This sentence is the only one that my administrator asked me to change all year. It was an exciting game, but factually, no actual clawing took place. It was simply my student's attempt at imagery. In this moment, as simple as it sounds, I realized how much power a student publication can have. As our own Steve Elliott said, as he quoted a very famous movie, "With great power comes great responsibility."
ReplyDeleteI think I would have made the same decisions Paula. I also feel that if it had been my situation, I would have encountered similar obstacles: uninformed reporters and the issue of timeliness. I have often grappled with the timeliness concern, but your post really makes me consider how to get my reporters more informed and more interested inschool politics. Teenagers care about who wins Homecoming, not what the Board of Ed says. However, the Board of Ed influences their daily school lives much more than any Homecoming Event. I suppose helping them to see just that is the key.
ReplyDeleteI don't even think it's close, Paula. You made the right decision. I've had the same type of issues with the surveys we've done. We're not crusading journalists, we're teachers and if our students aren't ready for the consequences of being in the middle of a real controversy, we shouldn't push them there -- at least that's my take.
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