I found Steve Elliot's session on ethics thought provoking. Ethics requires us to ask ourselves, "are we doing the right thing?" We need to involve students in the discussion to find a course of action more-or-less acceptable. Afterwards comes the time to stand firm.
Steve, at right, provided us with valuable information from his PowerPoint presentation and also his decision-making experiences while with the Associated Press.
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(Note on the pdf files from 2001: whatever serif fonts the newspaper used in the print edition at the time changed to Helvetica in the pdf version.)
Here are two real-life situations I was involved in, with links to the stories. Looking back, I ask myself if I and we did the right thing.
Case one--my student paper, The Magnet Tribune
In 2001 football players at the high school that provides my magnet school with most of its students were accused of drinking on the bus while returning to Laredo from a playoff game in Corpus Christi against Harlingen High School. I think there were seven boys accused of drinking.
This was quite a controversy, and student staff members decided to cover it. There were many rumors surrounding the matter, many of them unfair towards the accused boys.
Newspaper and television stories interviewed the coaches and school principal, but there was nothing from the boys. These boys were really dragged through the mud!
Student staff members approached our principal, who was nervous about the story (of course) so the kids asked me to visit him. I explained a story written by our students would do a lot to settle gossip and rumors about the incident. I told him the accused boys needed to get their side of the story out to the public. (I recall the principal telling me, "don't rock the boat.")
Three students volunteered for the story. They interviewed three of the accused who agreed to speak, as well as another athlete and a non-athlete.
We got their stories and slapped them together in a hurry and got the paper out just before the Christmas holidays.
Well, the local daily, Laredo Morning Times, liked the story, and the editor asked me for permission to reprint it. It received a heavy dose of editing by an LMT editor at the time and ran in the Dec. 26, 2001, edition, on page one. See http://airwolf.lmtonline.com/news/archive/122601/pagea1.pdf with the jump at http://airwolf.lmtonline.com/news/archive/122601/pagea18.pdf
Unfortunately, the Web site we were on in 2001 is no longer available so I cannot present the story as it originally appeared in the school paper; however, I still have copies of the paper at school.
Then, a student at another high school which supplies us with students responded with a letter to the editor, which ran on Dec. 29, 2001: http://airwolf.lmtonline.com/news/archive/122901/pagea4.pdf. Her letter is titled, "Coed revisits LISD code of conduct."
(Note: I was not involved with editing the story, and I did not work on the night it was placed on the page. To have been involved would have been, of course, ethically wrong and a conflict of interest.)
My student staff members felt they handled the matter in an ethical way, as did the principal. We received a lot of positive feedback from our students and faculty. I was proud of my students for volunteering to cover this incident, especially as it intruded into the final exam schedule.
That the daily newspaper ran it on page one says a lot for Anita, Joey and Wesley's efforts. Thumbs up on this one.
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Case two--daily paper
This one I'm not proud of. It deals with a late-nite (about 10 p.m.) situation at the Laredo Morning Times on a night I normally didn't work at the time. Both the regular news editor and copy editor had apparently taken the day off, so I worked. This situation, like the one above, was in 2001.
We probably had an AP story and photo across the top of page one when our Spanish-language reporter Miguel Timoshenkov (as he now refers to himself) came in with the story on a narcotics-related shooting and a contact sheet of photos and negatives. He told us not to ask where he got the negatives from.
The then-city editor was still in the newsroom, so she, I and several others started a discussion on whether we should run the windshield photo. The other photo, at right, we thought was appropriate. (Link is below.)
The question: Is it ethical for us on the U.S. side of the border to run a graphic photo showing a bloody body? Such photos at the time were commonplace in both Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, daily papers and nobody thought much about it as it such things were acceptable en el otro lado (on the other side).
After a few minutes I had to leave the discussion to translate the story into English, which took about 10 minutes, while the debate continued, then had to continue with my news editor's duties. Eventually I was called back into the debate.
I didn't want to run the windshield photo as it was too graphic and we did not know the source of the negatives, but everybody else wanted to use it. As I recall, none of us really knew what to do, and besides, it was getting late. We had to have page one back by 11 p.m.
(Be warned: the photo is graphic and not for the delicate: http://airwolf.lmtonline.com/news/archive/092801/pagea1.pdf
Readers were outraged! The paper handled dozens of calls the next day and received numerous letters to the editor over the next few weeks from people who were upset over the windshield photo. I don't blame them.
Was it ethical to have used the windshield photo? I don't believe so. My opinion: its graphic nature was not approprate, and besides, the photos were from a source not revealed to us in the newsroom. Thumbs down on this one.
What to you think about either or both cases? I"d like to hear your reactions.
Mark Webber
Vidal M. Treviño Magnet School
Laredo, Texas
Posts
Still troubling you after eight years--these must have been tough decisions. I agree in case 1 that the boys involved needed their side of the story told. It calmed the waters, rather than rocked the boat. In case 2, I think the photo should not have been printed. As Alan mentioned in his presentation, sometimes ethics are different from locale to locale. In the U.S., societal norms generally lean toward the less graphic.
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