We had recently finished Steve Elliott's very engaging, albeit somewhat Pollyannish presentation on journalism ethics.
We'd even Sarah Gassen, an editorial writer at the Arizona Daily Star tell how she declined a 35 cent Coke from a city councilor.
Then we get to see Woodward and Bernstein summarily break every rule and moral dilemma that we have discussed. It is a marvel that the movie ATPM continues to be held up as a shining example of journalism at its best. It seems as if these two journalists--who inspired an entire generation to follow in their field--broke every rule in the book to get the story.
The enigma, then, that we hoped Pulitzer-winning former Miami Herald reporter Steve Doig had the coda to, was this: When is it OK to break the rules, in the interest of pursuing the story, and when isn't it?
When Doig returned the next day for a follow-up session, he addressed the challenge of working as a journalist with difficult sources. He acknowledged, just as Woodward did in the movie, that sometimes it is the duty of an investigative reporter to "persuade someone to give you information that ultimately may hurt them."
Unfortunately, though Doig said he was often OK with not announcing himself as a journalist, he never directly addressed the issue of when it's OK to open up the back of tricks or to play hardball with .a source. One can only assume that it varies from situation to situation and from person to person.
One thing Doig said, though, that rang true for all situations was that empathy was one of the most important tools in working with sources.
"Some of the very best reporters I know are the ones who are able to put themselves in the place of the person, kind of talk to them as peers and so on."
Ben Sellers
North Stafford High School
Stafford, VA.
Hi Ben,
ReplyDeleteGood post on a complex subject, at least IMO. I think that most investigative reporting is far more mundane and doesn't involve all the rule bending and deception. I also think Steve D was talking about more of the extreme situations that do come up, and ATPM was the ultimate extreme situation.
Personally, I view it as more of a story where reporters were the heroes than as a movie that is a good model of press ethics.
Our students are also so unlikely to get involved in any serious investigative situation that it's more academic than real. I cover this issue in my ethics units and then point out the unlikelihood of ever getting involved in such extreme scenarios.
It was also print oriented as well. What about video undercover stories where reporters pretend to be consumers, etc. and then have hidden video cameras? By definition, they don't reveal who they are because the people they're looking into would then alter their behavior. Is that ethical? If you think it's not, why? If there's some agency ripping off the public in some way, why not go "undercover" to expose them? Lots of stuff to discuss, huh.
-- Steve Caswell